YouTube viewers will soon have to sit through even longer ads, with Google rolling out new 30-second unskippable spots on a popular app.
YouTube has ads?
Sincerely,
Ublock Origin User
I buckled and just got YouTube Premium Family. Via India. For 4 bucks a month. For 6 people.
I needed a cheap music streaming service anyway.
That’s still possible?
Only via an iPhone or iPad with an Indian Apple Account and an Apple Card with Rupees from Amazon.in
Don’t even need to log out of your original account on your device. Just need to login in with your India account in “Media & Purchases” and the YouTube app will show the Indian prices.
what YouTube ads
I think it might be something that happens during that short pause before a video starts?
Who still watches YT without adblocker? It must be horrible.
Me on (android) TV. On PC I have ad blocker. On TV ads time is between 6 seconds and 1 minute. Sometimes ads contain AI slop. 💀
SmartTube for Android TV gives you adblock and sponsorblock
This app is unavaliable on my TV
Use Downloader by AFTVNews to download and install it, I guarantee it’s worth the ~5 minutes of effort it takes to do and AFTVNews Downloader is safe. I don’t know how anyone watches Youtube without ad block and sponsorblock these days, haha.
It works. Thanks
Its not an app you can install via appstore. You need to download the apk and install it.
Theres also the possibility to use a VPN and log in from Albania (I think) to avoid ads altogether because they’re not legal there.
It is Albania. I will say that it’s more correct to say that YouTube chooses not to send ads to Albania, rather than Albania banning it.
Albanians anti ad laws state that ads are required to be safe for children, with the platform being responsible for failure… So Google is not spending the effort to make the ads safe.
I didn’t know it is the other way around (Albania ban vs. YouTube not playing ads)! Thanks for elaborating.
Try ReVanced.
On TV I silenced them as they start and look elsewhere meanwhile… I find joy in training myself to be unable to consciously recognise at all what is ongoing till the video start
Someone who don’t want to lose their emails… In https://lemmy.cafe/comment/15974964 it was mentioned that their entire google account got banned for 10 years over adblocking youtube. I stopped watching youtube immediately… I’m not about to watch ads, but I don’t want to lose access to my 22 year old personal account… So many accounts are tied to that address, that I can’t manage to move to a different service.
FML what happened to “do no evil”? Now it’s “make money with the baby grinding machine for all costs”
Don’t log in on YouTube. Unless you’re uploading, there’s no point.
I would be scared as hell to rely on Google like that. You are one automated Ai decision away from losing access.
At least move your mail to a proper company. Jesus.
People with android phones who use YouTube app.
reVanced is alive, well, good, and at this point necessary
No, Firefox with uBlock works fine!
Watching youtube in a mobile browser works, but is a completely separate form of torture
It’s not that bad if you add uBlock, Sponsorblock, DeArrow and NoYoutubeShorts.
:sweat:
Do Vanced et al even have Sponsorblock functionality?
When I see a link to a potentially interesting YT video, I just send the link to my PC.
Ublock works on Firefox on phone. Can skip the PC step if ya want
I wonder what the breaking point is for those who don’t use adblockers.
I had been paying for it a while ago since, to be fair, the service is free otherwise and often times it pays the creator more. Then Youtube decided to give about $45mil or so worth of energy toward making pro-Israel content and suddenly I didn’t mind the ads so much anymore. Now they’re making it a lot worse and my solution is going to need to be an adblocker.
Remember that some people voluntarily pay for TV and streaming with ads.
Yeah, funny people. I personally prefer my ads to be free on free streaming services. Even if it means to wait a few weeks or so before desired content will be available on these services.
Youtube: “People are blocking are ads and costing us money, what should we do?!”
The People: “Police your platform and stop advertising scams, hate speech, pornography, and all the other shit.”
Youtube: “I just have no idea what to do, so I guess I’ll just invest millions/billions into making ads harder to block, and make the ads longer and unskippable. You know, Just make the platform almost completely unusable without adblocking”
The People: “YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO, JUST POLICE YOUR FUCKING PLATFORM ALREADY. IF YOU DID YOU WOULDNT NEED TO DO ALL THIS SHIT”
Youtube: “Oh, btw, heres another PragerU video thats 3 hours long and talks about how the black man should be grateful for the white man uplifting them via slavery, followed by a ad thats basically a woman fingering herself to advertise chinese AI girlfriends”
The People: adblocking intensifies
Fuck, I was with them when it was 1x60s ad or 2x30s ads only in the middle of the video. I would grumble at 30s/15m.
I turned off the adblock the other day to pay physics girl some ad-rev, it was fucking unreal. I was trying not to skip, her 8m video tried to give me a 30 second ad, a 5 minute ad, and a mutli-hour ad. Who the fuck would watch that, who the fuck would pay to put a multi-hour ad on an 8m video that nobody is going to watch?
One day the ads will catch up to us, they’ll just embed them in stream and refuse to let you ff/rewind. and at that point, i’ll just go back to record->comskip and store what I want to see on my nas.
and a mutli-hour ad. Who the fuck would watch that, who the fuck would pay to put a multi-hour ad on an 8m video that nobody is going to watch?
People who are hoping to get a captured audience that cant get up and click the skip button for whatever reason.
They least they could do is target it a little. It’s always about some shit that YT already knows i DGAF about
never know, you’d be surprised the assumptions youtube makes about you based on what you watch.
I watch a couple fishing channels, and it seems that anything outdoorsy youtube automatically registers as conservative republican, and increases the right wing/prageru propaganda significantly during the times I dont have adblock (When I used to use xbox to watch youtube on the big TV, I replaced it with an old laptop entirely to get adblocking running)
Nah it doesn’t matter what ads they’d have or how well they police their site. I’d block them regardless.
That’s the craziest part isn’t it? All of this data collection so they can build profiles of us, and then they just don’t apply any of it to ads.
I don’t like watching ads, but it would at least be slightly more tolerable if I got ads for things I actually wanted. On my TV I watch YT unfortunately not adblocked, and never once have I seen an ad for anything that appeal to me.
This is tinfoil hat stuff, but based on the ads I’m shown, it’s almost like they pick ones they know won’t appeal to you since they know anger drives up engagement. Google can probably guess from my search history that I’m trans and asexual, since I’ve asked questions online relating to that. And then the majority of the ads I get on YouTube are porn and anti trans things.
Anger does drive up engagement, but the point of engagement farming is supposed to be so that you keep coming back to the content (YT videos, articles, whatever) and therefore it gets more exposure so that the attached ads get more exposure.
The ads themselves designed to make you angry at them doesn’t seem to make sense, at least as a default practice. There’s really only hyperspecific niche scenarios where the ad itself making you angry at the ad is beneficial to the people paying for it.
If they actually wanted to show ads targeted to me, first thing they would figure out is if I’m capable of buying their stupid bullshit product. I’m poor as the rat in the church, my monthly budget is literally -50€. I can’t afford to buy anything, what good does it do for advertisers to let me know that they have a new phone that costs 1500€ and is 0,05mm thinner than the previous one?
No matter how rich you are, if you have seen the ad, then their job is done. They pay YouTube to show ads to as much people as possible, not to just ones who can afford buying their products.
Yeah I was specifically talking about how google etc tell me that they are offering me “targeted” ads. Point was, if they knew anything about me, they’d know I’ve been poor as fuck for the last 20 years and should advertise food banks etc to me, instead of the latest Macbook Pro AI Super 2000.
YouTube does police their platform, they curate it for babies and remove anything critical of the government
I love when two conflicting conspiracy theories meet online.
Oh no, the ads I block are getting even longer!?
not unless you figured out how to adblock on youtube tv. this isn’t for desktop clients.
I just purchased a new travel router that will have options for ad blocking built in. Would that block ads on any device sharing that connexion? TV, phone, PC, smart fridge,…?
Those will not block YT ads.
They’ll block ads at a DNS level, but YouTube ads are delivered directly into the video stream.
Those will not block YT ads.
This is correct
but YouTube ads are delivered directly into the video stream.
This is false
this is false
So far
And the reason is that those ad-blockers are based on DNS block lists, and YouTube ads are served by the same servers that also serve videos.
This is my understanding as well, yeah.
Youtubes ads are not delivered into the videostream. That would mean reencodingevery video for every user and would need an insane amount of computing power.
Why would you need to re encode when you can literally pause one stream swap in the ad and then swap back in the paused one in the same response
Exactly. Instead of editing within the video stream you just switch to a second stream.
However from youtubes perspective that has the downside that the switching logic is where adblockers can hook in to block the ads.
That would mean reencodingevery video for every user and would need an insane amount of computing power.
You actually don’t have to, on account of how adaptive video streaming works. It’s fully possible to serve a few segments of ad content mid-stream.
Honestly, it varies. Businesses are starting to get wise to DNS adblockers, and are serving more ads from their primary domain (this is part of why you can’t block YouTube ads with a DNS blocker anymore - you can’t block them at the DNS level without blocking all of YouTube).
You’ll see a noticeable downtick in phone ads from web browsing and ad-sponsored games, but something like a TV or fridge will probably be unaffected because the ads will be served directly from the same host as the content. You’ll see fewer ads but far from zero.
Also why are you connecting your smart fridge to a travel router? Do you travel with a smart fridge?
Fridges have ads…?
No XD i was just wondering what kind of ads it could block. It will be my dedicated VR router when not in my main setup and i’m wonder what else i could do with it.
Just FYI you don’t need a special router to block ads on the DNS level, you just need to point the DNS settings in your current router to a server that does filtering. Theres a couple of public ones set up to do that for you but you can also point them to a LAN IP and roll your own DNS server (like Pi-Hole or AdGuard Home)
Depends on how they’re served but mostly, yes
But, topically, will not block YouTube ads
Not youtube ads, sadly, if they are blocking based on domain names. For YouTube, you can use pipepipe, which do block ads as far as I have seen.
deleted by creator
I’m just imagining how spammy it would be to see this reply on every comment that has more than 69 upvotes.
Yup. At one point that number was 69 in order to get to where it is now. Good job.
Thanks.
and only a minor inconvience as youtube delays the video for adblockers, of course they will try to make that permanent somehow.
Pretty much stopped using it once they decided my 20 year old account must belong to a child and demanded my ID. (Still don’t know why that happened. The account itself is over eighteen and I don’t live in the US where that policy was supposed to take effect.) This doesn’t make it any more appealing.
I remember when you just had, like, banner ads and an ad next to the video. And now you get those gross ads for AI sexbots and stuff.
And I really don’t think the latter is just because of my own search history. I’m asexual and don’t look at porn sites. I also noticed an uptick in the sex ads after YouTube decided I was a minor, so that’s pretty freaking weird.
Then I also get far right ads about how trans people are terrible, that are basically hate speech and propaganda.
I wish other platforms for long form video content existed.
Of course, the whole age verification idea is so the pedo-in-chief can target children more easily.
For your own health I recommend an ad blocker. uBlock Origin works on the YouTube website and dodgy apps like NewPipe don’t show ads.
*uBO + SponsorSkip
Right? Holy weird and gross, Batman. “Do you want a cream pie? D/L this app and have the dirtiest night off your life.” Literally an ad for an AI app on YouTube. What the fuck?
YouTube has ads?
Firefox with ublock origin for desktop and mobile. Grayjay for mobile (integrates Nebula too so you can get both your feeds at once). Android TV with FCast and Smart Tube Next for your TV. Never see ads again.
A/B testing is showing they are going after people with ad blockers: https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/youtube-is-apparently-punishing-ad-blockers-by-hiding-comment-section-3320581/ But your specific combo seems good.
They keep trying. The adblockers keep winning. I’ve had my fair share of videos sometimes not loading, or regularly needing to update apps to keep up with Google’s latest bullshit, but the minor glitches and headaches are worth it for all the time I don’t spend staring at a greyed out skip button.
Pretty sure several engineers from google itself might be contributors to some of them, fortunately.
That genuinely would not surprise me in the slightest.
All you have to do is close the window every time they try that bullshit and that shows up in stats. Get enough people doing it and they’ll back off
Wait, YouTube’s idea of punishing ad-block is removing the most toxic, worthless part of the site?
Nobody tell them. Not one fucking word. We might even get them to remove Shorts, too, if we pretend this is a bad thing.
Please Google don’t get rid of shorts! Especially the ones with the wonderful AI voice over and karaoke style closed captioning! Please don’t do that! Or else I’ll keep using adblockers.
I’m so happy they got rid of dismissing shorts and throw them in a feed more! Please don’t get rid of them!
Why would I ever want to see youtube comments? Literally zero impact for me.
was going to say, shoot I’m gonna install an adblocker just for that feature!
The one thing I like them for is nostalgic songs. Almost always a great vibe in the comments
Oh, no! Not the comments, those are always so smart and insightful.
Are they really threatening us with a good time? No YouTube comments is a benefit, not a punishment
I know they are trying but so far it seems the ad-blockers are winning because I’ve not noticed any interruptions or problems with comments so far.
If I want to see the comment section I use official app, and just pause the ad.
If I want to go blind I splash acid in my eyes
I’d recommend using lasers for that 🤣
Good call, a more targeted approach.
Hiding comment section? Oh no! What will I do?
Unless I’m missing a “freeze pane” option somewhere, scrolling down to read comments prevents me from actually watching the video.
by hiding comments
So using adblockers is even better than I realized?
I mean, I intentionally block the comment section, but sure,
Grayjay only supports Android, so let me mention Tube PiP for iOS
Oh, excellent, I’ll be checking that out right away. I have an iPad that I’m stuck with from work and it’d be great to get ad free YouTube there.
My friend told me recently about TizenTube which is a youtube app with adblock/sponsorblock for Samsung TVs
Anyone know if theres such an app for LG tv’s?
I run both those and I see ads every time google breaks ublock which is monthly now. Grayjay is broken more than its not at this point and requires like 10+ tries with various ciphers.
I think the day of these ads becoming unblockable is coming soon.
Are you running Ublock on Chrome or Firefox? It works significantly better on Firefox. I’ve never seen an ad get through it.
or more accurately: google has made it impossible to make a useful tracker and ad blocker for chrome
Firefox. Google does AB testing so they roll out the anti adblocking changes ot some users. Its usually effective at blocking adblocker for a day or two. Sometimes i have to watch the Ad sometimes i have to sit and stare at a black screen for 15seconds.
Also Brave just straight up blocks ads by default across the browser. And it’s a damn good one too
got anything for samsung tvs?
Yes, just connect a small computer and then install Firefox with unlock origin on there.
ideally something that could be used with a remote control or easily through the phone instead of plain firefox.
Someone else in this thread mentioned TizenTube, that sounds like what you’re looking for.
But personally I just grabbed an Nvidia Shield. It works great and if you swap out the default launcher you’ll never see a single ad on it (with the right apps). Plus the pro is beefy enough to run some decent emulators too.
i have a couple of options i want to experiment with, but this tizentube thing sounds like a nice to have.
Smart Tube is useless for me. Takes forever to load the video and usually craps in the process. Pass.
Do you have a weird network/Google TV setup? I run it on a stock nvidia shield with no pihole or anything and I’ve never had any issues with smart tube, it’s great.
I tried it on my Sony TV, which runs Google TV.
YouTube has ads?
I demonetized YouTube on my android platform long time ago
and they’ll be unskippable
I’m sure i’ve heard this before, but yt-dlp still skips them fine.
Yt-Dlp has been breaking recently and requiring cookies to be entered in order to work at all.
I’ve never seen a company quadruple dip on something before. It’s like surviving enshittification and then still continuing to push for further revenues.
Error retrying …
Rate limited, waiting 60 seconds …
Video not found
It has been breaking a lot lately and it’s really sad. I pretty much pull all of my content off of YouTube now through yt-dlp so once that goes, im pretty much entirely YouTube free. I absolutely refuse to use it in the state it’s in now and really wish more creators would offer content on other platforms. Yt-dip is amazing and great but shouldn’t be the permanent solution.
Isn’t that what Nebula/CuriosityStream is? All my favorite YouTubers promote it, though the caveat is you have to pay but I think the money actually goes to the creators (and they put bonus content on it like a patreon).
With YouTube 55% of the money goes to the creators (and they don’t need to pay hosting costs).
Never seen this, though i’m only a occasionally user, prefer text over video.
The article about crappy ads wants me to turn off my ad blocker, lol
It’s the year 2026. Irony is dead.
I recommend Peertube. There’s not much there yet, but myself and others are trying.
Also, did you know you can upload your video to Peertube and have YouTube pull it via RSS? That’s what I’m doing!
All of my stuff you’ll find on Peertube and I don’t have to do anything else to get it up on YouTube.
No one will create content without ad revenue. Peertube is doomed to fail.
This is a terrible take, as most content creators I watch already cannot survive off of Youtube ad revenue and rely on third-party monetization, like Patreon subscriptions.
Besides the fact that plenty of people make content for free, from the simple love of creating something.
Didn’t YouTube start without ads? Was doing fine back then, right?
I don’t think it had prerolls during the flash days but it had banner ads as far back as I can remember
Flash… flash macromedia… the golden age.
Well, no. It’s been losing money for years. But I doubt this will make it profitable.
I don’t think people were doing it professionally as much back then.
People started doing it professionally when the ad money came in. Before that people did it for the love of the content, and it was lower production quality, but better content.
Lots of people did it on YouTube for years. Even more on other platforms.
NoBOdY wIlL dO AnYThiNg wItHOuT PrOfiT mOtIvE
This book, YouTube’s history, and the span of human history say otherwise. You’re spouting capitalist rhetoric which is ultimately a lie told to us on repeat to encourage greed, selfishness, and individualism.
The platform you’re using right now was built without profit motive, there’s plenty of content. PeerTube can achieve the same.
Except for all the people already making unpaid content. I guess if you ignore them then yeah, you’re right. Great job advancing the conversation in a meaningful way.
You obviously didn’t experience the early internet
People will create plenty of content for free. Basically every blog, early YT video and all of Wikipedia was made by people who just like creating stuff for free
There are already some youtubers linking to their patreon because their content gets demonetized frequently (shiey, gifgas).
I think this could be the way to go. Instead of patreon, liberapay could also be used.
I’m creating content and YouTube pulls from my Peertube. So I’ll never lose it. All of these content creators are leaning on Patreon as none of them can count on ad revenue anymore. So people are already doing it.
And Peer tube will never fully replace YouTube, but also, it doesn’t have to. Your local library, school, church, community space, doesn’t need ad revenue.
no content is there
It’s so fucking funny though. I would love to pay YouTube. But I will never pay a company that abuses my data the way they do.
There’s that, but I’d also like to point out, that as a paying customer, you’re still force fed that bottom tier slop with no way to filter it other than hoping some combination of reporting/not interested/don’t show me this channel again works.
But even if you say, not to recommend a channel, it can still show up. So you get to pay for low grade AI slop videos. Or “content farms” that take 2 videos and just splice them together for some reason (both horizontal and vertical). Or the “I’m just going to stare at the camera and do nothing while I play a video that’s from another platform”. Like it’s endless.
The “shorts” platform is pure garbage. Can I turn shorts off? No I can “show fewer shorts”.
So you pay, to not get ads. They sell ALL your data to double dip (since they selling your data anywho) and there’s no benefit for the content. They have all this data, all this tech, and the platform is rot with shit.
The “shorts” platform is pure garbage. Can I turn shorts off? No I can “show fewer shorts”.
Once again the pirate version (revanced) of youtube is better than the actual paid version. Revanced and ublock filter take care of shorts for me. Haven’t seen them in months
On my desktop I use YouTube Enhancer on Firefox and you can make it to where shorts literally never show up.
Now, if only it could filter out the “Buy Premium Now” and “Try Out Our AI Bullshit” boxes that appear…
You can also just use a ublock filter to block shorts
That’s true. I guess I would only pay for a YouTube that is actually useful. “People want to block channels. Best we can do is ‘I am not interested’ and still show them.”
I’d be willing to get YouTube Premium just to get rid of ads, but they’re bundling it with YouTube Music and I’m not trusting Google with my music purchases any more, thank you.
They discontinued Google Play Music (fortunately only after a long long period of time allowing you to download MP3s with their bloody terrible client app, so no loss there) and told me that you can just import the purchases to YouTube Music. Which I couldn’t actually access.
Also I don’t want a music streaming service, I just want to buy the albums. It’s pretty sad that it seems the only remaining feasible local option for electronic music purchases is iTunes! Bloody iTunes!
I just use bandcamp and cds for most stuff. If its out of print or unavailable outside of streaming (i listen to a lot of indie pop), i just rip it offline. Not my fault they dont make it easy to get legitimately.
Its just stored in a folder on my pc. Like 800 hrs of music and growing. Quit streaming all together like 6 months ago now
i heard they even planning ads on “paid” version eventually.
you gladly feed them your viewing habits to increase their value to their shareholders though 🤷
you aren’t hurting their bottom line by not watching ads. You’re just making a tiny dent into a single line of thousands on some slides on the evp of youtube’s quarterly presentation. No one else notices.
Your data and viewing habits and patterns and all of the device info you leak and broadcast? The wifi signals your phone is always seeing? Oh that bluetooth device that just rode past your apartment while your blocking ads on youtube? Definitely not being seen by them. Apps are spyware these days, and they are spying on everything
My main point is that if it wasn’t a privacy destroying capitalist evil company and website, that it would provide enough possible value for me to want to pay. My data is one of the reasons it isn’t, I was merely answering to the article and context here.
