The cat and mouse game continues. We’ve been in a cycle of YouTube increasing the ads, driving more people to block them. I’m not sure that pushing harder on the audience with the lowest tolerance to ads is the way to go, but I guess we’ll find out. Maybe there’s enough people who will cave and don’t have the technical literacy to find further workarounds.
I’ve been saying for a while, that if YouTube really cared, they’d make you login, or otherwise choose not to let you watch and here we are. Seems like the obvious workarounds are VPNs or alternative front ends.
I hopped on the youtube premium train a long time back, just because I mainly used youtube to consume podcasts and the like and it paid my creators better and got me no ads on youtube anywhere. The first time these BS policies hit me, a paying user, I will cancel it and never look back.
The official statement from Google included in the article makes it seem like Google is de facto fine with paid YouTube Premium subscribers using ad blockers, whether or not the legalese officially allows that. That makes sense since they wouldn’t be showing you ads anyway. So I doubt they’ll be targeting you with this new policy.
Lots of reasons, chief of which being, I primarily consume them at my desk on my spare monitor, and the ones I follow usually have some visual stuff to check out.
Couple that with being a programmer, and I get a lot of mileage out of youtube.
YouTube knows that people who insist to not watch ads/pay premium will find a way to watch it for free, and they don't mind it. They mind of people who got the ad blocker as freeware and watched YouTube without ads when they don't mind getting it.
Looking at YouTube numbers and the growing hype of Arc browser and other freeware blockers, make sense of such a not-insisting ad blocker wall.
This requires that you are logged in to YouTube, doesn't it? I'm not sure how deep in the minority I am, but I use all Google services in private browsing mode if I can get away with it.
Without logging in some features are restricted. Most notably allowing viewing of videos that might be graphic (e.g. involve sensitive topics) you must prove you're 18+ by logging in.
I have a home toolchain making use of flask, yt-dlp, sponsorblock, plex, and ersatztv and it all works so well. I could not imagine watching youtube in a browser or a crappy roku app.
I just have to hope this war never comes to my small village.
It doesn't take much glue to make them work together. I paste a url into a textbox, flask runs yt-dlp in a subprocess, file saves to an area already defined to be a Plex library for youtube videos. I make playlists or ersatztv schedules as needed in the respective UIs.
As a free market maximalist, I believe YouTube has the right to show me as many ads as possible; but I reserve the right to close my eyes and not watch them.
An adblocker helps me close my eyes at scale, and so if YouTube wants to interfere with that, that's where we'll have a little issue.
Yes, they also do and I wholeheartedly support that as well. How many customers are they willing to piss off for their anti-adblock push? That's the question.
Readit News
Yea no thanks, we have ad blockers and now use Orion browser to watch on ios mobile.
Couple that with being a programmer, and I get a lot of mileage out of youtube.
I might just designate Edge as my "google" browser :-)
I just have to hope this war never comes to my small village.
An adblocker helps me close my eyes at scale, and so if YouTube wants to interfere with that, that's where we'll have a little issue.