YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

Re:YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers by xurukefi on Thursday May 11, 2023 @02:27AM (#35898438)

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Ad blocker detection is an arms race and considering how big YouTube is, people will definitely fight back and go very far out of their way to avoid ads. This could get really ugly given that Google controls Chrome and its extension ecosystem.

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Re:YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers by ddtaylor on Thursday May 11, 2023 @02:56AM (#35898683)

> This could get really ugly given that Google controls Chrome and its extension ecosystem.

It would eventually give them the smokescreen they want to pull uBlock Origin from the chrome extension store. A while ago they basically used their weight to remove most video downloading extensions and added language to their terms of service which all but says "no youtube downloaders" and I would like to say it cost them, because it should, but most consumers are absurdly apathetic and don't care.

Adblockers are a larger group, but in the grand scheme of things I don't think it will have much impact. The Internet as a whole is a very large group and even though uBlock has a huge audience it's a drop in the bucket.

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Re:YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers by bdlowery on Thursday May 11, 2023 @03:24AM (#35898902)

It’s not an arms race. Twitch has already figured it out. It’s absolutely impossible to use any sort of adblocker on twitch. It’s so bad that the best solution to “block ads” on twitch is to use a proxy to a country that isn’t serving ads.

Unless twitch has some crazy way of inserting ads into the video stream, YouTube will be able to do exactly what twitch has done.

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Re:YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers by xurukefi on Thursday May 11, 2023 @11:51AM (#35903948)

> It’s absolutely impossible to use any sort of adblocker on twitch.

I have never seen any ads on twitch. I just checked with DevTools and it seems like uBlock Origin simply blocks a script called "v6s.js", that is apparantly responsible for serving ads.

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Re:YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers by bdlowery on Monday May 15, 2023 @01:34AM (#35944220)

idk what to tell you. I have uBlock Origin on and without the proxy I see ads all the time. Either you're not in the US or you're just lying. There's a thread on the uBlock origin website with over 1,000 comments of people saying the same thing.

There's also posts their daily about how ads are not being blocked on twitch anymore.

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