YouTube now blocking ad block (opens in new tab)

I really despise shorts. I wish i could block them in YouTubes own app.

About 10 years ago i put up some basic videos of some openGL stuff and games stuff I was working on for college. These were screen recordings. Not from a camera phone.

A few months ago I checked and YouTube had converted them all to shorts. No way to undo this. Now my decade old very basic projects get randomly shown to people that didn't search for it. And the Shorts format removes/hides all the text explaining the video context etc.

Youtube have no method to allow me to undo this. Any video of certain resolutions and lengths will be converted to a short. The only suggestion online from other users is to reupload the videos but add large side margins.

My objection to the first argument is that I don't think YouTube adds a lot of value to my life; it's the individual contributors who do. These creators are on YouTube because that's where the audience is and vice versa. I have a lot of problems with Google's stewardship of this dominant position and I don't want to do anything to perpetuate it. The creators who do add significant value to my life I support directly through Patreon and/or through watching them on Nebula, which is a paid video service.

There's a third side (as always):

"I was fine with paying for YouTube, but the price has gotten so high that it's unreasonable."

I'm not going to pay YouTube more than I do Netflix, Hulu, Disney, even Spotify. Especially when they're starting to get competition from Nebula, Curiosity Stream, and even TikTok.

There is also an argument that web services should not force you to pay after already pulling you in for free (unless it's explicitly a trial). Obviously this doesn't account for people using a service for free due to a hack of some kind, but there is also an argument that adblocking is not a hack - rather, that it is a "working as intended" feature of the web, and is simply a habit of a subset of the viewerbase, and, crucially, that this is known to YouTube, who chose of their own free will to explicitly allow it for many, many years.

I'm a little doubtful about that second argument.

I find Shorts annoying, but at least on the web YouTube and on the app version that is on my streaming devices Shorts are grouped together making them easy to ignore. It's not like they autoplay or are animated. They just take up a little space on some pages.

Recommendations are also easy to ignore.

The thing though is, it's not really two distinct arguments. It's easy to pay for it and control the experience by blocking shorts or recommendations using uBlock.

What the second group of people really want is to not pay for it and also block ads.

> There are two sides to this argument:

It is a disservice to users of the service to whittle down this issue to 2 simple points. Under Google's lead, YouTube has been offering a service - as we've been accustomed to accessing it - since 2006. That's ~17 years.

Suddenly, they want to change the very nature of their business model. It is no longer the YouTube we've been accustomed to accessing for those ~17 years. A no log-in required service, ad-blockers, plenty of browser extensions, etc..

Let's keep in mind that YouTube made ~$29.2 billion in revenue in 2022 [0, 1]. They reported 2.7 billion active users in 2023 - this makes them second only to Facebook.

Its YouTube Premium Service has 80 million subscribers (as of September 11, 2022). Netflix, in comparison, has 247 million subscribers worldwide (3rd qrt, 2023) [2]. Disney+ has 146 million worldwide subscribers (3rd qtr, 2023) but they've been bleeding subscribers [3]. These are actual Premium Video Services.

YouTube is trying to be both an annoying (ad-ridden) general video site and a very expensive premium site. I call this arrogance.

Basically... YouTube is doing very well financially right now ($29 billion). They want to make even more money because $282.8 billion (2022) in revenue for Alphabet is not enough [4]. We can all see the greed.

The problem... Google wants to do this by changing the core of their business as far as access is concerned. It is this change to their core business model that we are up in arms about. It will no longer be the same site.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube?useskin=vector

[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/250934/quarterly-number-...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1095372/disney-plus-numb...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc.?useskin=vector

It's both A/B tested and a very frequent cat and mouse game with ad blockers. Youtube was pushing out updates daily, and uBlock Origin was responding in kind within hours (Sometimes you would need to manually update your extension though). The last few days Youtube hasn't put out any updates[1]. I believe the last change was 3 days ago.

[1] The current youtube ad notice version can be found at the bottom of this link. No dates, but it's useful to compare if you knew what the last uBlock Origin filter version you were aware of. https://pastefy.app/G1Txv5su/raw

> It's unclear to me if they gave up, or if they're testing this in waves to see what happens.

Or if your ad blocker updated its filters to a version which successfully evaded the ad-blocker detection.

Same here. Looks like they're A/B testing it to see if this strategy actually works, i.e., if people convert to Premium users.