Technology @beehaw.org Kingsilva @beehaw.org 12 mo. ago

Ad blocker uninstall rises due to YouTube ban

samrome58.substack.com Ad blocker Unistall is at all-time High Following Youtube Ban

The Battle Between YouTube and Ad Blockers: An Ongoing Struggle

25 comments

Yes, they uninstall and then install an adblocker that works. Click bait.
- Yeah, who's gonna say "Oh, I'm not blocking ads on YouTube, better take the time to make sure I see ads everywhere else as well."
- Yeah for a while I used Adblock plus and ublock. With this adblock plus was just tripping youtube so it was an immediate uninstall. Stupid article is stupid
  
  Why would you use two adblockers at the same time? That's just bound to cause problems. And that doesn't even go into the whole adblock plus drama.
Misleading. Ad blocker installations also rose. This isn't people leaving adblocking, this is people changing to better ones.
uBlock Origin has kept their filters up-to-date for me. Still no ads, and no blocks from YouTube, since day 1. I did disable my other privacy extensions like Privacy Badger and Ghostery on YouTube to stay on their "good" side however.
- I recently had to disable ad blocking within Enhancer for YouTube, but uBlock Origin took over and it works great so far.
  
  Does that fix it? I disabled the whole addon because it interfered with the anti adblock measures. Unfortunately many features of it are pretty broken at this point and the author even removed it from the Firefox addon page.
Yeah, probably lots of people uninstalling ghostery and adguard so they can install ublock origin.
The ad blockers in question were AdGuard and Ghostery, acc. to the article.
uBlock Origin is still working fine for me. And NewPipe in the cell phone.
- Ghostery isn't even an ad blocker, it's just to prevent tracking.
  
  Ghostery does work as an ad blocker too, and advertises (eh) itself as such.
  
  Plus, for corporate nowadays, tracking and advertisement are two steps of the same process.
- Where do you get NewPipe and is it good
  
  It's on F-Droid. I personally haven't used it in a long time because you couldn't sign in to your account. Not sure if that's changed. I'm currently using revanced which is great.
  
  As the other poster said, it's on F-Droid. It's mostly a Youtube frontend, although it accesses SoundCloud and PeerTube too. And more importantly, it doesn't download advertisements from YT, so you don't even need an ad blocker when using it.
I uninstalled chrome. Stopped logging into YouTube. And moved to freetube on desktop. Newpipe on Android.
It will be another dark day on the internet if Youtube finally blocks out the last adblockers.

As a small channel owner, there's no other viable place to share my hobby content. Up until six months ago, I could count on Reddit for 150-200 views, now it is 15-20. If Youtube finally goes full enshitted, there go the rest of my viewers and I may as well just give up making stuff.
This result honestly sounds like their best-case outcome. I don't like much of what Google does, but I'm certain a lot of discussion went into what would be viewed as a "win" on this call, and my guess is "some number of people stop using ad-blocking software" actually beats out "some people are converted to subscribers" (an effect not measured here and somewhat necessary to get any context for one data point) by virtue of Google being an advertising company.

Regardless, they're targeting only low-hanging fruit: people who use ad blockers to block ads. Sounds tautological, but this excludes anyone concerned about privacy. Nobody using an ad blocker in concert with other add-ons is going to be converted here. And I sort of wonder whether media coverage from when the crackdown started inflated ad-block installs among people who'd never used one, thus making this win less substantial on a longer timeline.
Do other non ublock adblockers not have the ability to whitelist specific domains? Or are people just unaware of it? (Probably the latter id assume)
- Yes to both questions.

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