YouTube’s ad blocker crackdown now includes third-party apps

That and the large ad networks even on sites like YouTube and Facebook literally are advertising scams. Every time I browse shorts on either I get ads that are obvious scams of the "There's a new $6400 monthly health credit see if you qualify." variety. On one of Meta's apps I got an ad that was for male enhancement that was straight up clips of uncensored hardcore porn. Not just nudity but full on PIV sex. If they can't even do the work to properly screen their ads they can get fucked, I'm blocking all of it that I can.

Non disruptive ads were meant to advertise.

Slightly annoying ads were meant to be seen more, since people just ignored banners by default.

Hidden ads (like an ad in an article which you really could tell it was an ad) were meant to increase the image of a company.

Disruptive ads like in YouTube or Spotify aren't meant for advertising. They don't really care about the advertising money, they want to force you to buy premium. The more annoying the ad is the higher the chances you pay 20€ a month for them to go away.

Yeah, the pre-ads (unstoppable) and the massively increased loading times of the basic Youtube page makes it impossible to successfully Rickroll people

And you see digital tv providers trying to implement fast forward blockers without chasing away their customers too much

That argument was in fact made when VCRs first came out. I don’t remember how exactly it played out but in the end the courts here in the US said that VCRs were fine.

The agreement isn't that you watch the ad, but that you allow the ad to play on your device. That's it. Whether or not you see it or hear it doesn't matter; the "cost" for this type of content is a few moment of your device's time, not your attention.

When YouTube Red first dropped they were putting hour-long pilot episodes of their shows as pre-roll ads. Now I notice ads on shorts are full of obvious scams related to "new monthly health credits". Still better than getting an ad on Facebook reels that was uncensored hardcore porn.

Google: You're pirating our content!

Us: Yeah, so what?

My god… are you… me? Same exact shit. Created my YT account 14 years ago. Made some vids… some got some views… eventually I got a few dollars deposited like for 3 years. Probably totaled the same $100 you mentioned then boom. Shut down.

I manage a large network and ads are blocked at the edge of the network.

You must MITM all traffic and do some magic with stripping/injecting JavaScript then? Because every time I've tried with pihole, its just threads and threads of people saying its not possible with DNS blocking because the ads are served from the video servers.

Yeah I wasn’t using an Adblock on YouTube when this all started. Then the ads got so intrusive it was seriously hindering content. These days I don’t watch much YouTube, but it’s with Adblock

I mean, the argument falls short when YT (or LTT) spew literal garbage.

The fact that you don't like the product doesn't really change that their expected transaction is "watch an ad to receive it". Every argument against the idea of not watching the ads being piracy seems to be, essentially, either "the product isn't good" or "the price is too high", neither of which is relevant to the fact that they've put a "price" on it and you're skipping the part where you "pay".

Quality of the videos is irrelevant. Intrusiveness of the ads is irrelevant. The ads are the price, the videos are the product. You're getting the videos without seeing the ads.

I agree that the "price" is too high, the ads are awful, and the videos are frequently bad. I will continue to block those ads as long as I am able, but I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that I'm not skipping out on the cheque, as it were, when I do so.

I might have a hint of sympathy if it wasn’t a dumpster fire of decaying babies.

Literally no one is asking you to have any sympathy. Why get so defensive when it's pointed out that skipping ads is skipping on your side of the transaction when using an ad supported service?

Fuck YouTube acting as a sleezy middle-man

A sleezy middleman that happens to foot the YT infrastructure bill.

Cool, let's body shame people.

Fuck that victim-blaming nonsense. The entire reason ad blockers were invented in the first place were because ads in the 90s and early 2000s were somehow even worse than they are now. You would click on a website, and pop-up ads would literally open new windows under your mouse cursor and immediately load an ad that opened another pop-up ad, and then another, and another, until you had 30 windows open and 29 of them were pop-up ads, all of them hoping to trick you into clicking on them to take you to a website laden with more and more pop-up ads. Banner ads would use bright, flashing, two-tone colors (that were likely seizure-inducing, so have fun epileptics!) to demand your attention while taking up most of your relatively tiny, low-resolution screen.

The worst offenders were the Flash-based ads. On top of all the other dirty tricks that regular ads did, they would do things like disguising themselves as games to trick you into clicking them. ("Punch the monkey and win a prize!" The prize was malware.) They would play sound and video--which were the equivalent of a jump scare back then, because of how rare audio/video was on the Internet in that day. They would exploit the poor security of Flash to try and download malware to your PC without you even interacting with them. And all this while hogging your limited dialup connection (or DSL if you were lucky), and dragging your PC to a crawl with horrible optimization. When Apple refused to support Flash on iOS way back in the day, it was a backdoor ad blocker because of how ubiquitous Flash was for advertising content at the time.

The point of all this is that advertisers have always abused the Internet, practically from day one. Firefox first became popular because it was the first browser to introduce a pop-up blocker, which was another backdoor ad blocker. Half the reason why Google became the company it did is because it started out as a deliberate break from the abuses of everyone else and gave a simple, clean interface with to-the-point, unobtrusive, text-based advertisements.

If advertisers and Google in particular had stuck to that bargain--clean, unobstrusive, simple advertisements that had no risk of malware and no interruption to user workflow, ad blockers would largely be a thing of the past. Instead, they decided to chase the profit dragon, and modern Google is no better than the very companies it originally replaced.

My guy, that’s why there is DRM. Your screen are loading pixels, because they let you.

When I ping YouTube's server it provides me with a stream that contains an ad and a video. What I do with that stream is my problem, and if I want to chop it up it's something I can freely decide.

Your server can send any data it wants, but it can't decide what I do with it, are you nuts?

Advertisers, Malwares and Ad blockers are all to blame for the current state of the internet.

So the thing that blocks the first two is equally to blame?

I remember the day I started using an Ad blocker. I used to not care at all about ads on sites, "it's how they make money. I can live with it." And then I encountered a banner ad that screamed "HELOOOOOOO!" every time my mouse went over it. I couldn't download an ad blocker fast enough.

Advertisers and Malware are to blame for Ad blockers. Advertisers will get more and more annoying and intrusive until people reach the point that they won't put up with them anymore. Seeing as the internet is one big bucket and I can't block some ads, then I will block all ads.

MY hardware and infrastructure was not free either and I and ONLY I get to decide how it is used.

If something allows it then it's morally justified. You can't be naked intentionally and ask me to not look at same time.