https://9to5google.com/2023/11/25/youtube-ads-speed-up-workaround/
A super clever workaround for YouTube's crackdown on ad blockers sees YouTube ads sped up dramatically instead of blocking them.
![Clever workaround speeds YouTube ads up instead of blocking them [Video]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/7aed1c38-33dd-4ee1-9e12-c7df9d8c215f.jpeg)
Instead of blocking them, this extension speeds them up to x16 and also mutes the ad. Experiencing a 30 second ad in 2 seconds is pretty funny. And it works on Edge and Chrome.
While some paid ad blockers seem to work, the vast majority of tools don’t seem to do the trick.
What a bunch of FUD. Firefox and uBlock Origin still work on Youtube just fine.
Part of the reason I am not advocating for or against the extension or the source. People can judge for themselves. I thought it was funny (not a great idea but definitely an interesting implementation). For the record I use both unlock origin and Firefox, and I also run a pihole at home. I'm just putting out there that it exists.
I moved back to Firefox like 5 years ago. But saying the vast majority of tools don't seem to do the trick is a pretty true statement, since that's one browser with one app, and the browser only has a sub 10% market share.
For a little while, a long time agoit was Firefox that had gotten slow and bloated, while Chrome was not. Then, things changed again.
I moved away a few years ago for the illusion of more privacy, while still using Google on Firefox
Maybe they mean the vast majority of tools on Edge and Chrome? Plus this approach may or may not preserve dollars for creators
I don't know about FUD, but that's either straight-up disinformation, or an out-of-touch tech writer that needs to retire...
uBO works on Chrome as well atm. I have to use Chrome on my work laptop, but at least they installed uBO.
Everyone's hating on this approach but I think it's nice that we have other options. I'm sure Ublock is going to come out on top of this cat and mouse game YouTube is playing with them, but if YouTube manages to temporarily disable Ublock I'll look into this solution. Thanks!
Google will give up eventually. They're definitely burning more money than they would gain from winning the battle
They give up on everything else all the time. I wonder if expanding their ad business is the one exception though. They ran out of new users and already pack videos full of ads. Forcing them on people who block them is the only thing left for them to attempt as they seek to continue perpetual growth.
Ads are the very core of Google at this point. They are more likely to give up their search engine and the name Google before they give up their ad business.
Unfortunately the videos with ads absolutely packed through them are largely due to the creators choosing the settings for extra monetization.
Youtube just made changes that prevent creators from choosing to only allow skippable ads. Now youtube chooses what type of ads to run at the start and end of a video.
The only choice creators have is to enable or disable mid-roll ads, and where to place them (but the default is to allow youtube to make those choices too)
I do not believe that is the case. Youtube ads are an insanely profitable business. I suspect throwing a couple dozen of FTEs on blocking ad blockers would be <1% of current revenue.
I don't doubt they make tonnes of revenue from ads however you have to remember how small the share of adblocker users are. So the extra money from fighting the adblock user base is a clear gamble. Especially as those types of users are the ones who are more likely to avoid YouTube completely if they can't bypass ads.
Someone in Google would have done the research because it's not a simple case of war profit = adblockusers * ad revenue per user
I strongly believe they'll stop once they hit a certain threshold/target of "reduction of adblock users". They won't go on like this forever.
Don't forget they want to introduce things like WEI to lock down what devices and plugins you can even use on your own computer. That's what Google stands for.
To be fair, at the current monopolistic state of YouTube, how many people are actually likely to avoid YouTube completely?
If YouTube truly succeeded in forcing 90 seconds of unavoidable ads with no exceptions without paying $20/month then I genuinely think YouTube won't be a monopoly for very long.
Honestly I've tinkerd with the idea of making a genuine ad free YouTube competition. But the industry standard is operating at a loss. No one wants to pay for a YouTube service and no one wants to watch ads. If anyone has any ideas on how a YouTube competitor could stay afloat I'm all ears.
Oh I don't expect it to be free and ad free. Just not as invasive as it is now, the ads are relentless especially when the form factor of videos are usually proportionally quite short.
Alternatively have a reasonable price for add free. Google is an enormous company which operate as a loss for monopoly and exposure reasons, they've put themselves into this position
How can a competitor handle Google dropping ads and/or pricing and run at a loss until the competitor is bought or destroyed outright? Google has too much money and existing infrastructure for someone other than say Amazon to compete with YouTube and god help us if that’s the alternative we get.
How can a new competitor acquire content creators to actually threaten the monopoly? Genuine question.
They can't. Unless YouTube fucks up big time, nothing will touch it, especially since they are the most "generous" with their payouts to creators. Only if someone steps up with a platform just as good as YouTube (UI, infrastructure) AND pays a bigger share, maybe it will happen. But video streaming is a thankless business so I personally doubt it will happen anytime soon.
Sub question. How can a competitor handle Google dropping ads and/or pricing and run at a loss until the competitor is bought or destroyed outright? Google has too much money and existing infrastructure for someone other than say Amazon to compete with YouTube and god help us if that's the alternative we get.
They're definitely burning more money than they would gain from winning the battle
Maybe at the moment, but I suspect part of the motivation for this is that they are trying to prevent another "adpocalypse" type boycott from their advertisers.
That's why I tried to present it without an anti-google seeming bias. I wanted people to just have the facts and not all the BS in the article. I think it's a good option for people who don't want to block ads so creators they watch benefit.
My ff got hit by the blanket 'no fire fox' issue. Now even with no mods youtube won't work at all.
Downloaded free tube. Keep thinking to make some kinda macro to auto switch to it when I search in ff search bar.
What the fuck is wrong with this shit article?
The crackdown on ad blockers has been quite effective
No, it hasn't. What's up with the doublespeak?
While some paid ad blockers seem to work, the vast majority of tools don’t seem to do the trick.
Patently false. uBlock hasn't had a single hickup.
Fuck whoever wrote this garbage.
I don't know. I bet it has been pretty effective, but I also don't think I'd trust any data I'd see from Google.
But, their goal isn't to get you or me to watch ads. Hell will freeze over before I spend 30s watching an ad for a video that's barely double that. Their goal is to target the people we've installed ad blockers for: friends, parents, siblings, in-laws.
I'm not going to watch ads, and I sure as hell am not going to click on anything, but my mother in law does now. My mom does too. They now feel like an ad blocker is "too much hassle," so Google won that fight. I don't know if new people are installing, updating, or changing ad blockers enough to offset right now.
I’m not going to watch ads, and I sure as hell am not going to click on anything, but my mother in law does now. My mom does too. They now feel like an ad blocker is “too much hassle,” so Google won that fight.
Google won until the next round when, to make even more money for the shareholders, they will put so many ads in a video that also your mother and mother in law will return to use an adblocker. Or leave YT entirely
They all pretend ublock origin don't exist, they only talk about the old stupid for profit AdBlock that let's "good ads" through.
Yeah, no. I'm not willing to even have the ad for any amount of time. IMO ads should be banned, and before anyone reaponds, no i don't give a shit about the consequences of a change that substancial
Then this isn't for you. That's fine. Adblockers like ublock origin still work. So do newpipe, piped and other front end services. Firefox and other non-chromium based browsers etc. Do what you want with your devices.
i don't give a shit about the consequences of a change that substancial
Aaaah, the very sign of a simple mind.
(abolitionists circa 1800) IMO slavery should be banned, and before anyone responds, no I don’t give a shit about the consequences of a change that substantial.
Some things are simple and don't require a nuanced take. I'm not saying ads are anywhere near as important as slavery but the consequences are smaller too. Thinking something is an unmitigated negative and should be got rid of regardless of consequences is a legitimate position.
How would getting rid of ads work? Like logistically? Is a fancy box for your product an ad? Is eye-level placement of a product on a shelf an ad? Is the make and model branding in a vehicle an ad?
I would love to see less ads, or no ads, I’ve done all I can to remove them from my life entirely, but the magic wish kind of removal of them seems… impossible
It would work the way the internet worked before google and facebook monetised monitoring everyone to sell ads, people who want a website paying to host it, and if they are a company charge for whatever they are selling.
It would work the way the internet worked before google and facebook monetised monitoring everyone to sell ads
You mean the ads on the side of the screen that told you to play some interactive game in them so they could install malware? Ads of some form were always a thing on the internet, first in forum posts then to website ads then Google started essentially buying ad space on other websites, and paid you for it. I hate Google but when that first came out at least most ads weren't filled with malware at that point.
Yes ads have always existed in some areas of the internet but weren't central to the entire thing, they were more usually a way of earning a tiny bit extra on the side.
Sure but it's not like it was all sunshine and roses either, there were more frequent malicious ads but then again maybe those who are brain dead clicking everything in site (pun intended) should get blocked from the internet with a ransom attack encrypting their drive lmaoo
Youtube is a shit company owned by an even shittier company, they're not getting a single cent from me.
And ublock origin continues to work, thankfully. Disappointing to see the article failed to mention it.
Obscurity is an advantage in an arms war like this. The more popular a workaround gets, the more effort will be put into defeating it. You know it works, it doesn't need to become popular to validate that.
Firefox is still sitting at under 5% of users and it's the Firefox flavour of uBlock origin that I'm seeing people say still works at blocking YouTube ads (plus it sounds like Google is shutting them out of Chrome, though we'll see what happens to the browsers based on forks of chromium). It's a massive number of people in absolute terms, but tiny relative to the number of users who don't use FF + uBo.
I believe they're referring to the upcoming Manifest V3 changes. My understanding is that currently uBlock uses the old Manifest V2 that they're ending support for once V3 gets pushed. I believe there is a V3 version of uBlock but because of the limitations in V3 it's not as effective at blocking ads.
I have less problems with actually watching it than the fact that those ads they serve are very often times completely inappropriate and not respecting my online privacy.
Same here. If I'm watching a biography about Nathaniel Hawthorne, then why would I want to see an ad where someone is twerking their ass in my face?
A year or so I turned off targeted ads from Google. I very quickly noticed an increase in ads with anime tiddies.
I guess Google sees a correlation between people who worry about privacy, and people who are likely to click on anime tiddies...
Ya know the "it's for targeted ads" is total bullshit. Where the fuck are the targeted ads YouTube. These data collectors are creeps. Simple as that.
I watched two hours of Rocky & Bullwinkle uninterrupted the other day thanks to FireFox and uBlock Origin
Anyone else getting the "you will be blocked after 3 videos" yet? Haven't seen anyone talk about it but I saw it for the first time yesterday.
Not if your uBlock origin is up to date, sometimes you have to clear the cache so the filters update to bypass that
This may require a refresh of your blocking lists and/or a making sure ublock is updated to most recent versions.
I know it's explained in the subreddit for ublock origin and I think people reposted it sonewhere on lenmy too, but I can't remember where exactly.
Anyway, after doing that it works perfectly. No more of those screens. Best of luck.
I haven't seen it, but I usually use Invidious on my computer because of YouTube's buggy, slow design
In before Ads are recorded at 1/16th the speed in order to play at the correct speed with one of those extensions.
I suppose it depends on your system's abilities, but my guess would had been that you get all frames but for shorter period of time
The "Look at what they need to do to have a fraction of our power" Invincible meme comes to mind.
Pathetic to be satisfied with sped-up annoyances when they can be easily skipped altogether with a browser not controlled by the ad company.
I don't know man. This is actually pretty genius. Because this way creators still get paid. I wouldn't mind using such extension on Firefox. Problem is I still want to block all trackers and other nonsense...
Doesn't the creator only get paid if someone actually clicks on the ad? Pretty sure the creator gets nothing if no clicks are accumulated.
Haha two exact opposite answers. From what I remember, the advertiser can chose the payment model. They can either say "I will pay YouTube a tiny amount for every time the ad is shown" or "I will pay YouTube a less tiny amount for every time the ad is clicked". But it was a few years ago that I read about it so it might have changed since then.
I tried actually searching for info about it, but it seems that YouTube and Google want to be as vague as possible about how it actually works.
Yes, let's be a YouTube creator and base my income on something extremely vague and shaky. Sounds like a good life decision.
Sounds about as stable as asking the all mighty magic 8 ball how much you should be paid. Maybe yt should just do that for the creators and let them in on it. /s
Agreed, I'm testing it on opera and might have it installed for the soel purpose of watching youtube (with firefox for everything else)
Firefox and just pay for a reasonable 30 second YouTube ad which is just a blank screen with the text "Use Firefox Already"
On the other hand, this will royally piss off advertisers if it takes off. Make Google play a losing game of whack a mole with a ton of options on how to subvert their annoying platform
Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. This add-on subverts the TrueView advertisement (or impression how they call it) that Google promises to advertisers.
I'm on the edge of what to think of it. Blocking ads primarily hurts Google since bidding never occurs and this speedup thing mainly hurts advertisers but also puts Google in an awkward situation.
Am I the only one experiencing little 1-2 second jitters? It’s as if it skips where an ad should be. I still don’t see an ad though.
Awesome, now you get only subconscious messages flashed in your eyes.
What else are people going to do to avoid installing Firefox?
Awesome, now you get only subconscious messages flashed in your eyes.
Blipverts. If I recall correctly, they had some bad side effects on sensitive people.
I don't know how much anyone's subconscious is picking up in 2 seconds. Remember back in the day when people used to tell you they could study while sleeping by listening to a recording of a lecture? That didn't really work either.
Some people have to use it for work. Including me, although I don't have this problem because I don't use it for YouTube.
I’ve been A/B testing Chrome and Firefox at work since we’ve had it drilled into us that we absolutely have to use Chrome. I haven’t had a single issue with Firefox, even with internal web apps. Your mileage may vary though.
They're probably not making the infrastructure decisions around which browser they get to use.
True. Having said that in the majority of workplaces you can still download another browser if you wanted. If Firefox works just as well as chrome, why not use it.
For me specifically (though I don't use it for YouTube) the work apps I'm required to use are codes for a chromium browser and the IT department doesn't want us downloading anything to the work units. So I either have to use edge or chrome (both of which are provided). If the work apps don't work with one we're instructed to switch to the other and so on. When I was in the military we were told to use Internet explorer and a lot of websites made for the military didn't work without it. This is a legitimate thing.
I completely understand you. My previous company had an incredibly strict IT policy, they blocked all downloads on their devices so you’d need an administrator to download anything for you.
I’ve heard of stories with internet explorer. I know a lot of web apps built for labs only work on Internet Explorer, they just never update them to work with anything else.
It's cool and all but it's still that annoying break when you are trying to enjoy a video or learn something.
This will take you out of the flow also.
You aren't. I also use Firefox and ublock origin (but sometimes have to use chrome for work).
I'll have Youtube start bitching about... once a week or so, but that just means I have to clear my block lists and re-load them.
Or just use something like Redirector and redirect all youtube links to invidous... or piped.
Nah, the article is just bullshit. uBO works flawlessly on both Chrome and Firefox (we will see what happens in 2024).
Between uBlock and Sponsor Block I've had absolutely no interruption in service and it's the exact same experience that I've had for years
Use Freetube on the desktop and Newpipe (or the Sponsorblock version) on mobile (Android). No issues or ads
I installed this other one https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ad-accelerator/gpboiedfklodfhngobidfjecdpmccehg?hl=en because this one seems to the FOSS.