Did ad blockers survive YouTube's offensive? Letting numbers talk
Did ad blockers survive YouTube's offensive? Letting numbers talk
YouTube tried to block video playback for ad-blocking users last year. Some even thought that this global effort would lead to the demise of ad blockers. But that did not happen.
TL;DR version:
From June to August, the number of active users of the AdGuard Ad Blocker extension for Chrome dropped by about 8%. But in late August, the trend reversed. The temporary slump in user growth was offset by the increased demand in the second half of the year.
After a brief period of turbulence that lasted about a month, we saw the trend stabilize. And while the daily number of uninstalls was still higher than before YouTube's crackdown, it remained consistently lower than the number of daily installs.
After media reports and YouTube’s own statements implied that ad blockers were doomed, and especially after more and more users started noticing that their ad blocking extensions were not working properly on YouTube, we did indeed see a spike in uninstalls. However, at the same time, the number of installs also increased significantly! It may well be that the way ad blockers’ woes were amplified in the media inadvertently boosted their popularity and helped them woo new users.
The takeaway from all of this is that ad blockers — first and foremost, ad-blocking extensions — were rocked by YouTube’s onslaught, but survived. And, moreover, the interest has rebounded, as is evidenced by the growth in the number of active users.
I've been using uBlock Origin in Firefox on both Linux and Android this whole time. If Lemmy hadn't lit up about it, I wouldn't have noticed. I never saw one ad or that "dur hur no ad block" message.
And I let Youtube ads run for YEARS. Ads basically everywhere on the net have become intolerable in their content and quantity, so I said enough. And it is 100% Adsense's fault.
Keep using adblockers and don't surrender your digital freedom to big tech corporations. Also check out private frontends for YouTube (and other plattforms: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/frontends/
So far, no ads on YouTube. The defenses hold!
I wonder if they saw a large enough down tick is user traffic to realize that endlessly badgering people with 5 ads to watch a 30 second clip is driving away their user base.
I know my YouTube consumption has decreased by a factor of 10. I used to use it for almost all of my streaming entertainment. In conjunction with other streaming services’ password sharing crackdown, I am spending more time reading and going outside than I have in the past decade. That’s a trend these providers don’t want catching on.
I got hit hard by the cpu bombing that youtube did to punish adblocking, to the point i had to stop watching videos while playing games.
cause having a video running while playing a game would bomb my performance so hard that I'd go from 150+fps to 15fps.
I think, ultimately, Googles war against adblockers Streisand'd the fuck out of adblockers and probably got more people ultimately to use them, either out of spite of googles bullshit or because they saw the arguments and realized the web was far better with a digital condom.
YouTube slowing itself down to unusable made me write a local extension that takes any YouTube watch link and opens it in yewtu.be my life has been better since. Fuck you tube's stance. You're gonna make the experience terrible I'll watch your content via another client.
I was someone who always knew about ad blockers, but just wasn’t bothered enough to use them.
I used YouTube SO much that it was worth it to me to have premium.
After all the bitching and moaning from YouTube last year, I un subbed, downloaded free tube instead, and also finally added an ad blocker to both my mobile and desktop browser.
I imagine I’m not the only one with that story haha.
Did they survive? In my case, they got stronger.
In principle, I actually support the idea of people running sites being able to support themselves financially through advertising. I just don’t like when the ads go too far into obnoxious territory. So before all this, I used Adblock Plus with its "acceptable ads policy" to let through unobtrusive banner ads but block prerolls, large graphics, and interstitial ads.
Unfortunately, ABP didn’t adapt to YouTube’s changes quickly enough, so I switched to uBlock Origin. Now I don’t even see unobtrusive ads. Google shot themselves in the foot over this one.
Then, there’s this: https://restoreprivacy.com/state-spyware-extensively-using-ads-as-distribution-channel/
For this reason alone, fuck any company banning ad blockers.
Honestly, whenever I want to watch YT, I just open YT with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock in a Private Tab. Haven't really noticed anything, and honestly it helps me to stop watching videos.
Well I'm not seeing any ads, so I'd say yes
I never even noticed their 'battle' using YouTube revanced. (only youtube client I use)
Didn't uninstall any of my AdBlock layers, but YouTube didn't survive.
Even though I actually never saw the famous popup, the whole thing made me take steps after months of feeling that the recommendations sucked and I was often wasting lots of time watching stuff I didn't even like.
Now I'm actually getting back into reading and audiobooks, and using invidious for the occasional watch.
I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on any of my devices, so I'd say "lol"
I saw the Youtube banner telling me it detected an ad blocker and wouldn't let me watch a lot for about a week. Now it's been over two months with nothing but smooth sailing on μBlock Origin. I'm even back to being able to block Shorts from appearing on my sub feed, where before it seemed like any YT-specific filters would let them detect the blocker.
I read the announcements but I haven't seen an ad yet on any of my shit.
This made me discover freetube, which is ads free and an excellent way to cut on YouTube « time sink » that Google is so good at, with its recommended tab, auto play feature, clickbait title.
Heroes.
I've always just used uBlock on Chrome and I never see ads. I'm not doing anything other than that so it surprises me so many people have such trouble with ads.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In late October, YouTube confirmed that it had “launched a global effort” to make users disable ad blockers on the site.
Like many other Google-owned services, YouTube has been making the bulk of its money by showing targeted ads that are embedded directly in the user-generated content.
and its cult status in the media-playing-and-streaming landscape, the escalation of the YouTube’s war against ad blockers drew a lot of media attention.
However, we needed time to make the necessary adjustments — not least because until YouTube expanded its test to a significant portion of its users, we had a very limited set of data to work with.
Note: For illustrative purposes, we have truncated the graph so the 8% drop in the number of users during the early stages of YouTube’s crackdown may appear more pronounced than it actually was
After an initial panic, users stopped deserting the AdGuard Ad Blocker extension for Chrome en masse.
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GrayJay has been great for Android, I haven't had any issues watching YouTube.
Using the built-in Ad blocking on Brave browser (both Android and Desktop) I haven't had any slowness or issues with YouTube at all.