UPDATE 2 It seems that starting today, uBlock Origin is working to combat this Youtube Block. Mine started working again! Lets all thank the devs of UBO for fighting this fight!

UPDATE So as new info comes out, I’ll be posting it here. It seems as if this Rollout Has Several Parts.

Part 1

You get a popup message over top of your video, blocking the screen:

  • This is the first sign. If you see this popup AND are logged into a YouTube account, your account has been selected.
  • At this stage you can likely close or block these messages with an adblocker.

Part 2

This message will change, indicating that you have 3 remaining videos to watch without ads.

Will insert photo once one has been found

  • At this stage your adblocker will imminently stop working in 3 videos time.
  • Personally using Firefox + uBlock Origin and tweaking filters and updates does not even fix it.

Part 3

None of the video loads now, everything looks blank.

  • At this stage you must tred new ground to avoid ads. I have posted methods in the comments. If you want to bypass this end page, read down there.

End of Update


YouTube has started rolling out anti-adblock to users inside the United States, which means that they are preparing to roll this out to the entire country. Personally, I have been blocked already. I want to gauge how common this occurrence is.

  • Honse@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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    1 year ago

    I’m going to start a discussion in the comments here about methods to bypass the message. I will add suggestions here, so leave comments if you find a method!

    Methods to bypass Youtube Anti-Adblock:

    • The easiest method is simply to comply and turn off your adblock extension.

    My Method

    • My method, and the one that will likely work universally is as follows:

    Install Extension Enhancer for YouTube™

    Go to the extensions settings and ensure that under the Ads Management section, “Block Ads” is turned OFF

    Now find the Custom Script box at the very bottom and enter the following script. I did not write this code, it comes from egaudette on GitHub

    (function() {
        'use strict';
        var clickInterval = setInterval(skipAds, 5);
        var ytpAdModule;
        var miniAdd;
        var skipButton;
        var currentVideo;
    
        function skipAds() {
            ytpAdModule = document.querySelector('.ytp-ad-module');
            skipButton = document.querySelector('button[class*="ad-skip"]');
            miniAdd = document.querySelector('.ytp-ad-overlay-container');
    
            if (ytpAdModule !== null && ytpAdModule.innerHTML !== '') {
                ytpAdModule.style.display = 'none';
            }
    
            if (skipButton !== null) {
                skipButton.click();
                return;
            }
    
            currentVideo = document.querySelector('video[class*="main-video"]')
            if (currentVideo !== null && currentVideo.duration <= 5) {
                currentVideo.muted = true;
                currentVideo.play();
                currentVideo.currentTime = currentVideo.duration;
            }
        }
    })();
    

    Lastly, ensure the “Automatically execute the script when YouTube is loaded in a tab” box is checked, and press Save


    I’ll add more methods as they are discovered!

    • Neato@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Why would this work when others get blocked? Is it a novel way to block YT ads that’s not popular? Because I think YT isn’t looking for specific extensions but looking for certain kinds of behavior.

      • Honse@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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        1 year ago

        This method lets ads load for half a second but then get skipped instantly. i have not personally found a way to 100% block ads once ive gotten their block page.

        • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          I use greasemonkey to do a similar trick with the skip and dismiss buttons. But added random delays up to 2 seconds in an attempt to mimic a human clicking the button.

          Also instead of an interval running, you can use MutationObserver and a callback to only run the code when the DOM changes and adds the button.

    • Farent@lemmy.scam-mail.me
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      1 year ago

      Please note that posting the script has html-encoded && <> and similar characters so you’ll have to replace those with the correct ones (or just get the script from GitHub)

  • Landrin201@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I genuinely think that advertising should be illegal at this point. It’s a ridiculous concept.

    • OminousOrange@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      It is a great example of how an industry can survive with only self-reported effectiveness. I remember a freakonomics episode where it was shown that very infrequently do companies get a positive return on marketing spending. It will be very interesting if that industry ever collapses.

      • jarfil@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Advertising is about creating trends, and catching some impulse buyers. Effectiveness is likely overstated, but on the other hand it’s difficult to quantify the effectiveness of a trend. I don’t think it’s likely to ever collapse, people will always want to believe they can influence others more than they actually can.

  • henfredemars
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    1 year ago

    This is such a better use of their time and dollars versus improving their service to make it more attractive to customers.

    If this is the change that really sets them financially straight, then I would say they have a failing business model.

    • splendoruranium
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      1 year ago

      This is such a better use of their time and dollars versus improving their service to make it more attractive to customers.

      Making their service more attractive to customers is precicesly what they’re trying to do.

      It’s just that an advertising agency’s customers are not the folk who watch, read or hear the ads, it’s the folk who pay for the ads.

      • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        I am not sure if it will work out like this though. The amount of ads they are forcing down peoples throat is isane. Eventually it will make people consume less videos and with that less ads overall.

        • splendoruranium
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          1 year ago

          I am not sure if it will work out like this though. The amount of ads they are forcing down peoples throat is isane. Eventually it will make people consume less videos and with that less ads overall.

          Sure, could be - but keep in mind that they have all the relevant usage data at hand. Any decrease in service popularity among users (or indeed any kind of user behavior) is immediately visible to them. They have the means to know exactly what annoyances the market will bear.

          And considering that YouTube still holds a de-facto monopoly on video discoverability within the entire anglophone internet I feel like it’s safe to say that the market will likely bear a lot more annoyances :P

        • machinya [it/its, fae/faer]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          capitalism (or at least the weird version of it used in the tech world) is about short term profit. if they get good numbers from this, they can make future projections of an imaginary increase over the years and make the ad companies happy for a while. they do not care about breaking the product in the long term

          • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
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            1 year ago

            I know. This was just the intelligent person view. In reality, as you said, they only care about short term profit, and can you blame them? Things can change overnight in the tech world. Google (as a product) was undisputed until ChatGPT was released and integrated into Bing, now Alphabet is falling vehind and losing its dominance on the market.

    • Landrin201@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      If premium cost $5per month I’d pay for it, u use YouTube all the time

      No way in hell it’s worth $15 a month though, their pricing is completely brwindead

      • Petter1@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Just make a (digital) trip to India and get family of 5 accounts for about 1$ a month per account. This the way I did it.

      • charles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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        1 year ago

        It’s $25/mo for family. I hate that I pay for it, but I use music, and I mostly watch YouTube on a streaming device, so I’ve never been able to use ad blockers. $15 for the fam felt worth it, but $25 has me rethinking. Maybe I can configure YT-DL to get the shows I care about on my Plex

        • TwoCubed@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Any android based streaming device can run SmartTube (formerly SmartTube next). On an Android phone you can patch the YouTube apk with revanced, which also gives you full access to yt music.

  • speq@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    For those who don’t know: VLC also takes a YouTube video address as input (in the menu: Media | Open Network Stream…).

    • mayo@lemmy.today
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      I’m ready for that. When being a youtuber started looking like a job I think the site lost something.

      • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
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        That is something you just cannot avoid with a new medium. Eventually there will always be professionalization. It just sucks that youtube now just gives us the same shit over and over instead of making it easy to find new creators, like it used to be.

        • mayo@lemmy.today
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          1 year ago

          I’d say just smaller, less scripted content. Maybe that’s what tiktok is.

  • LoafyLemon@kbin.social
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    Remember when some people said we’re nuts thinking Google will try to ban ad blockers with manifest v3? Yeah.

    • HerrLewakaas@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Google will try everything in their power to stop us from blocking their ads. It’s their main source of revenue, you don’t have to be a genius to see why they don’t like ad blockers

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Wouldn’t this show that they failed, if they have to recur to site-based adblocker blocking? Clearly v3 hasn’t stopped people from using Firefox, yt-dl, or whatever.

        • jarfil@beehaw.org
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          (according to latest statistics, Firefox would have an even lower share)

          My point is: if v3 were effective at neutralizing ad blockers in 75% of the user base, or even 95% since Safari is supposed to get on board too, why are they developing additional countermeasures?

          Or has Safari decided to do like Firefox, and still allow full ad blockers?

          • LoafyLemon@kbin.social
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            I reckon that blocking ad blockers isn’t some extra countermeasure here. It’s actually right in line with what Manifest V3 and that new environment attestation system are all about. They’re basically making sure that if you tinker with crucial bits of the JavaScript – stuff they see as essential (like anti-adblock) – you won’t make it through the attestation and you’ll get blocked.

            They don’t want to block all modifications because that would be a hindrance to many users, for example the visually impaired. However, anything affecting their bottom line will probably be blocked.

            How that will affect Firefox? I don’t know, maybe nothing will change for us, or perhaps Google will block Firefox altogether. We certainly know they’re capable.

            • jarfil@beehaw.org
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              Yes, attestation is in line with V3 changes, just that it makes them irrelevant: YouTube’s website could some day ask for environment attestation of “no extension using the intercept hooks”, or “only the approved ones”, and still have the same effect. The fact that they’re implementing a server-side anti-adblock now, while postponing V2 deprecation over and over, makes me think the V3 changes are a flop.

              Firefox… would likely require Mozilla to play ball and implement similar attestation in an official binary attestable by the OS. Edge too, just so MS doesn’t mess with Chrome’s binary attestation on Windows.

              Safari already has attestation, without extra parameters, but it could be extended:

              https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/

  • cosecantphi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    Youtube’s use of A/B testing is very smart in that it’s actually nothing about testing user response and all about limiting the number of people they piss off at once with their god awful changes.

    The day I can’t block ads on the internet is the day I stop using the internet.

    • energetic695@lemmy.ko4abp.com
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      targeted ads have broken the Internet, saturated our subconsciouses, hijacked the attention economy, and continue to erode what’s left of our dwindling privacy

      advertisers are the de facto gatekeepers of larger and larger swaths of online content.

      it wasn’t always like this. it’s gotten so much worse in recent years.

        • Mini_Moonpie@startrek.website
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          There’s constant fixes for it btw from the ublockorigin team now! :D

          Ads would have happened anyway like it’s happening on the streaming services. They’ve got people paying subscriptions *with *ads. Double the money, double the fun, right?

        • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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          I wonder if there’s actually any benefit to ads. Like if you could magically ban advertising, would people spend any less money?

          • bobman@unilem.org
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            1 year ago

            Banning advertising will cause people to rely on word of mouth.

            Now, instead of some nameless entity telling you a product is the greatest thing, you’ll be able to hold people accountable for the things they recommend you.

        • bobman@unilem.org
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          I wonder how lemmy makes money…

          Oh wait. It’s almost like ads only exist so people can make a living doing nothing.

      • bobman@unilem.org
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        1 year ago

        It’s only going to get worse.

        Shoving more ads in people’s faces just desensitizes them to it so you can keep adding even more ads into the mix.

        “You were okay with 2 ads, why not 3?”

        “You were okay with 3 ads, why not 5?”

        Repeat until the end of time, or until the masses stop being dumbasses and work together to topple the ruling class.

        P.S. I have no respect for anyone in the advertising industry. They are all scum worth less than the gum under my shoe.

    • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
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      Admiral is the worst kind of anti adblock there is.

      They buy thousands of domains at a time, with individually corresponding Google Cloud IPs to evade adblock lists. Real pain in the ass to block them, they also DMCA community blocklists containing their domains

  • Melody Fwygon@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    Here’s a rule for uBlock Origin.

    Credit: https://lemmy.one/comment/597479 && original link: https://lemmy.nz/comment/446556

    ! Anti-Youtube Anti-Adblocker https://lemmy.one/comment/597479

    youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)

    youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)

    youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])

    youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)

  • Venus [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    What happens to me now with Firefox and ublock origin is if i leave a video paused in the background for a long time and then it unloads it and then I click it to continue watching so it loads back up, then it plays an ad. I was legit like cat-confused because I haven’t seen an ad on the internet in years.

    • denton@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Same! I was taken aback and offended all at once then refreshed to get rid of the ad which thankfully still works… But for how long more is the question 😭

    • Mr. w00t@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Yep, same here. Today I’ve been abruptly reminded how intrusive and obnoxious ads on Youtube are!