Youtube Anti-AntiAdblocker uBlock Origin Filter

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gross-profit
Alphabet gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $42.688B, a 7.85% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2023 was $160.503B, a 1.7% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2022 was $156.633B, a 6.77% increase from 2021.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2021 was $146.698B, a 50.01% increase from 2020.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2020 was $97.795B, a 8.71% increase from 2019.
Huh, they seemingly have money to not fuck our eyes without lube for ads, but I guess they somehow just don't have enough money, 156 billion dollars is really nothing after all. Probably more money in between my couch cushions. Such a small indie company that has to struggle to remain afloat, like an Etsy store.
- BIG NUMBER MUST GO UP
  
  MUST APPEASE THE GOD OF CAPITALISM AND THE ALMIGHTY SHAREHOLDERS!
- Of course they don't have enough money
  The goal is (as always) to have all the money
- This phenomenon is normally created by a bunch of mid level people without many stock options trying to get promotions. They need the big arrow to go up to get a good raise, be recognized, etc in their individual business units.
  The people pushing things to go up are typically not motivated by the gross number as much as they are making their boss happy enough to pay them more. That's why the change is all that matters.
- Yes but does YouTube it's self make money? There isn't a reason to run a section of your company if it costs you money.
  I am not justifying 17 ads in a 10 minute video, but no company keeps a product that doesn't make money
  
  There isn't a reason to run a section of your company if it costs you money.
  It's funny that you say this, because Google intentionally ran YouTube without making any profit from it for many years. The goal (which they succeeded in) was to starve out any competition and establish YouTube as the online video monopoly. Ever since establishing that monopoly, they've been squeezing more and more money out of the platform knowing that social inertia will work against any would-be competitors (everything is on YouTube, all of the content creators are on YouTube, all of the viewers are on YouTube, so how does someone convince enough people to move to another platform?).
  
  True but data collection is still done and generates $$$
  Think about gmail & Google docs
  
  There are lots of reasons that one area of your company may make less money. It’s like how the NYC subway or post office technically don’t “make money” but the value they bring to the whole system is a net positive by enabling all the other companies to make way more.
- Alphabet
  what does this mean? is it the stock market in general or google or is it tech co's?
  
  Fairly sure that Alphabet is google parent company
  
  It’s Google’s parent company. Like meta to fb.
- How do you think they make that money? I mean yes it is an insane amount and do they need that much but they would still have ads.
- Just because a company is profitable it doesn't mean they can't ask users to pay for a service.
  I don't love Alphabet either, but in their shoes I'd block ad filters too. YouTube is spectacularly expensive to run.
  
  Ok, I'm curious. Gonna do some math.
  YouTube makes $30B/yr in revenue.
  YouTube has 2.7B active users.
  This means that YouTube is making about $11.11/person/year.
  uBlockO has 10m active users.
  This means that uBlockO is costing YouTube $111m annually, or about 4% of their overall revenue.
  I'll admit, that number is bigger than I expected. But almost any other line item on their budget sheet would be bigger.
  ETA: it's worth noting that YouTube has estimated operating costs of $5B, so this isn't coming anywhere near making them unprofitable.

I could tolerate ONE ad per video, at the beginning, but 3 or 4 ads in a less than ten minute video? Fuck that.
- You see YouTube is a American company and in America every thing is extreme you ether have a lot of ads or no ads you can have a extremely massive car or a cat that's soo small it doesn't exist
  
  But... But... What If I want a large cat and a tiny car?
  I want my leopard riding shotgun in my smart car.
- I could only tolerate ElectroBoom-style "This video is sponsored by oscilloscope company" ads.
  
  Don't forget the gold confetti
- That's the thing.
  You're already proud to lower your standards, why not lower them further?
  
  I really care about your opinion. It's very important to me.
- The whole reason is to either make it so annoying that you switch to their paid service or get as many ad dollars into the shortest amount of time possible either way. This is just greed to squeeze as much out of the consumer before they break us.
- Don't the content creators choose where to place ads?
  
  I have no idea.
- Straight up what made me switch to YouTube premium was a bit of a 2 pronged thing really
  They started including Google Play Music with it, and then I got an unskippable 1 hour ad in front of a video that after I reloaded the page I got the same ad again.
  Edit: I don't have an issue paying for a service if the price is right. I got what I wanted for I price I'm willing to pay.
  
  So basically you let them bully you into giving them money lol
  
  They bundle YT Music in your subscription because they wanted a share in music streaming, invested in an infrastructure on their platform and then realized that their service doesn't offer enough to make people want to use it over their competitors' music streaming services. Instead of taking that loss or making their service worth using, they bundle the shit nobody wants with what everyone needs and use that to justify a price hike.
  If there was a basic subscription that just removes ads on the videos I click on without any other useless crap attached to it, I would pay for that. But no, it's predatory, anti-consumer bullshit, so I just block their ads.
  
  Everything you just said, all of it, makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

This entire shitty ad model these companies have pushed onto the net needs to go. Seriously. Find a better way to monetize your world.
- This answer confuses me. The message on that pop up is "buy YouTube premium, so you won't be stuck in our ad supported model" and now we're ranting that they need to find another model to finance themselves? Isn't YouTube premium exactly that?
  
  Paying to remove ads is part of the ad business model. Upset your customer enough until they give you money to make it stop. Once you pay to remove the ads you have rewarded them for implementing ads which lets them know that implementing ads was a great way at making money.
  So YouTube premium is not another model. It is the same model. Another model is paying for a service that never had ads at all such as NebulaTV or CuriosityStream.
  
  You're right, but premium is too expensive. They make a pittance per ad view, but expect a user to pay $14/m to get rid of them? The math doesn't math.
  
  They simultaneously introduced this ad blocker change and took away the $5 no-ads package.
  This is a shakedown and it's been happening across many streaming platforms for a while now.
  
  I don't mind ads as a concept. The issue is how invasive and numerous they've become. Get back to the days when ads were just banners around the actual content or an easily skippable video that plays before what I'm trying to watch and I'll happily disable my ad blocker for you. Unfortunately hardly anyone does that anymore because they view it as a missed opportunity to make even more money.
  I'm not against using ads to support websites but it's the same basic concept as piracy. If you make the experience of playing by the rules so unbearable that it seems easier to go out of my way to break them then I probably will.
  
  What everyone else said but also they still collect and do whatever they want with your data even if you pay them. They purposely made everything more shitty and then charged to put it back to how it was originally. Also, they stayed free as long as they did to kill off the competition and it clearly worked. I just can't ever justify giving them money. Especially with the double dip on my data.
  
  But no, not like that. Clearly they need to find a way of materializing money from thin air.
- Like charging a fee?
  
  Make it possible to get Premium without YT music bolted on it.
  Believe it or not Google: Some users don't want it or already have a platform.
- I think about this Jaron Lanier talk a lot.

- Yeah. Nah.
  I shouldn't have to watch any ads on an already-profitable product. Accepting less is just me lowering my standards so people richer than me can be even richer.
  
  It's more than that. Would you devote 1-5% of your PC resources to others while you watch a video, if you could watch a video without ads? Yes. I bet so.
  We are able to easily shoulder the burdens of hosting, yet Google wants to dominate us and force us to use their hosting at the psychological cost of being their sponge for anyone's paid information campaign. YouTube in 2016 was non-stop Trump ads. Non fucking stop.
  FUCK Google.
  
  How dare you try to bridle unbridled capitalism
  
  Huh that doesn't make anysense? Youtube is profitable because of ads. It's not like it has a secrete revenue source and the ads are just gravy on top.

They're going to randomize all vars and function names, mark my words.
- Yup. Ad blockers work on pattern matching rules. Countering them might take some work but it's not impossible - make the URLs that do the bad shit indistinguishable from the ones that make the video works and likewise html elements. Randomise everything, make the paths to things unpredictable. I'm sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable.
  
  "I'm sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable."
  Who is going to tell him?
  
  Last part is already done. Ads are delivered by the same DNS as the video, which is why DNS-based blocking methods like Pihole don't work for YouTube video ads.
  If you meant that Google will re-encode every video on their platform and insert ads like the sponsor segments, that's not feasible. Ads ads served on a bidding basis and the advertiser who pays most, gets their ad delivered. That would be Impossible unless you keep multiple copies of the video with different ad segments.
- it will be an interesting cat and mouse game or people will start to shift to another video sharing platform
- Of course they are, for example when targeting HTML elements you generally need to target text not vars or function names.
- At the end there will always be some way since to the user the text should be similar or the UI should be similar... So there will be always a way... But yeah it can get more complex.
  The only exception is the case they implement the web integrity thing at browser level or equivalent.
- The point being that if one can find the domain through which they push said script/the script itself, they can disable it (I use NoScript).

How long until youtube add an anti-anti-anti-adblocker?
- Who blocks the blocker?
- Like a fuzzbuster. Radar detector detector detector

I miss 3 days ago when the blockade was just some HTML

Let the cat and mouse games begin!!!! Thanks for the heads up though

Anytime you all want to go back to making your own websites
Anytime
- It's pretty difficult nowadays to self-host websites when everyone and their nanny shares a single public IP address (IPv4 address exhaustion is real, everyone!) unless you purchase a hosting service.
  
  DDNS
  Before social media back in the 2000's i know quite a few personal site using home servers using them. And (google google) apparently these days cloudflare offers the service.
  
  Then purchase a hosting service. Off-shore VPSes are pretty cheap, and they take Bitcoin. Even fucking Paypal uses Bitcoin nowadays. Only hurdle in your way is you.

Get your FreeTube subs set up and ready to go. https://freetubeapp.io/

Is the any way to add something like this to my pihole to block all this shit network wide?
- Pihole, if i understand correctly, works by blocking DNS requests and YouTube ads are not DNS based the way ads usually are. You're stuck blocking them by uBO on each device or use Invidious.
  
  I just spun up my own invidious instance on docker today. I'm so mad that I haven't done this sooner!
- Unfortunate, no.

Semi-related: what's a good frontend for android TV? I'm loving NewPipe on my phone, but on the TV it refuses to work in full screen and often in not-full screen too..
- SmartTubeNext is your best bet, I think Libretube devs will be working on landscape support too sometime, but that's probably very far away
  
  Thanks, it's working great so far! 🫶
  
  From my experience, LibreTube simply doesn't work without a kbm. I couldn't even select an instance using the TV controller.
- Maybe Kodi works? It does on the FireTV Stick, as long as you can install apps from play store, you're good.

I had this code saved and had suggested it to others before but now I didn't take my own advice and had been struggling with those pop-ups for the past few days. I hope this solves it.
EDIT: Doesn't work. Still got the popup despite having all other extensions disabled and uBlock on default settings

as of now the 3rd code option works for me, first 2 didnt

Rad! Thank you!

Can't this just be a filter subscription or whatever in ublock origin?
- I mean I'm pretty sure it is, I'm only using ublock and have no problems.

and the code doesnt work, cause the thing just appeared while im trying to listen to music with my gf
- Got to try disabling all other addons/blockers. Some interfere or trigger the ad blocker detection.
  
  I followed those instructions to the letter aswell as cleared all the cookies and I'm still getting the popup. I first came up with this code more than 3 months ago so it's probably outdated by now.
  
  i never use normal youtube otherwise and i shouldnt have to play detective for this to work

Does that stop YT from knowing you're using an as block?

In human terms, what is that code saying? Never mind, it's in the source link
- There's a popup that YouTube has started showing these days that tells you "AdBlockers are illegal. Stop using them" or something to that effect. This blocks that popup from appearing.
  
  Somehow I still haven't seen that message despite also using uBlock and Firefox. Perhaps I'm just further down the line and Google will eventually come for me too, but I wonder if my DuckDuckGo and Privacy Badger extensions may also have something to do with it.
  
  Are adblockers even illegal? I didn't think it was.
  
  I keep getting that pop-up, I have had ublock installed for years. I haven't done anything special to unlock and just refresh the page and it goes away.
  
  Well, that's pretty dumb and ruins my good times. Glad people are cracking down on it

Many thanks!

Nice!

Some of the sports streaming sites have done this too. Any ideas if this will work there ?
- YouTube filtering is fairly unique to YouTube since they serve ads so aggressively so it's unlikely to help on other sites.
- J guess you need to adapt the code fot the page in question. If you read the code, it is setting some values to variables youtube checks for.