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 haven’t observed any problems with uBlock Origin on Firefox.
For those curious how efficient these things are, recently I did some tests using this tool (clear your cache between tests).
I had decided to install an additional DNS blocker on my OpenWRT router so I was curious how these methods stack up against each other.
I tested uBlock Origin, the Firefox (122) built-in ETP (Enhanced Tracking Protection) and the router adblock (only a modest 65k IPs in the default set, you can add more).
- Everything off gives me a score of only 3% blocked. Those 3% must be stuff so outrageous that they probably get blocked by upstream DNS servers.
- Firefox ETP only, set to strict: 41%
- Router adblock only: 69%
- Firefox + router both on: 83%
- uBlock Origin (alone or in combination): 97%
I got a 100% on iOS using Wipr. Not sure that’s accurate if ublock origin didn’t even get a 100%…
Must be a different statistic, I believe OPs stats are “percent of total traffic blocked” so 100% means your entire network would be blocked…
What list are you using on your router? I’m using Steven Black’s list (which is just an amalgamation of a bunch of other lists) for my PiHole/uBlock filter list, and Firefox+uBlock Origin scored 99% (only failing the cosmetic static ad test).
While easy to do, issue with doing this is you don’t give active views to the lists that get combine so the owners of those lists are less inclined to update/maintain them. I would recommend if the list is useful to get each of the combine lists he uses and add them all separately.
It’s the Adblock package for OpenWRT. The default selection is adaway, adguard, disconnect, yoyo, which is 3 x 10k lists and one 30k list.
I see that it has support for compiling Steve Black lists but SB can vary 50 - 500k and I only have a router with 128 MB RAM. I’ll have to experiment with the “standard” SB list, see if it fits and if it makes any difference.
Same. Didn’t even get any youtube pop-ups regarding adblocker detection. Also no slowing down observed (as was reported in some articles a while back).
I got a pop up once, I cleared the ublock cache and never had any issues after.
I saw a popup once, refreshed and it was gone. 🤣
Those slowndown article were clickbait / bad journalism , youtube hasn’t been slowing down the site for adblock user.
I moved from Vivaldi to Firefox during the crackdown, signed out all of my Google accounts, and immediately noticed the problems went away. Sorry Vivaldi…
Same. Not one interruption during the crackdown.
I’ve noticed the occasional jump cut forwards in video where there should’ve been ads, just two or three seconds.
I’ve gotten the pop-up once or twice, but updating uBlock fixed that.
I have instead noticed a large decrease in quality, things like frozen images/pages and endless buffering. I don’t know if all that is related, but it did start around the time YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers.
Missing piece in the numbers here is how many people were uninstalling adguard to switch to uBlock? Using one extension’s install stats to make conclusions about all adblocking extensions seems a bit much.
Right? I’ve never even heard of adguard
AgGuard was (is?) big on Android and DNS. Helped to get rid of ads in many apps.
Yeah their DNS url was pretty useful in blocking ads on the go when away from my pihole. But I still preferred uBlock on browsers
May also indicate that users were shopping around for a blocker that worked against Youtube. Maybe some of those users actually just settled with AdGuard coming from ABP, or uBlock, or whoever.
Pretty sure they did that on purpose, trying to skew the narrative. The goal is to make it seem like it’s all doom and gloom because it’ll get people to read the article to the end, and maybe in their minds get some people to stop using adblockers.
uBlock seems to have won the arms race, since whenever I had problems it worked again after updating it.
With unlock I didn’t even know there was an arms race. Seamless performance the whole time!
I’ve never given Youtube a cent and I always use adblock, on the endpoints and my network, and I have had no problems watching anything I wanted on youtube. I guess you just have to mercilessly block ads at all levels to achieve dominance
Yeah, never noticed a thing of this “war” because of FF and uBlock origin.
It all just kept working, including on Youtube.
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.
The fact that ads are so intolerable is the problem. I understand that much of the internet being free is because of ads. But we went from the early days of the internet where ads were malicious, active annoyances to the modern internet where ads are malicious, passive annoyances. Clicking on an ad no longer ruins my afternoon with a virus, but it does log and sell my data to the highest bidder. Nearly every ad on the internet is in bad faith.
Until we have better ads, I will block absolutely everything I can.
There’s no such a thing as good ads. Not even before the internet.
Ads basically everywhere on the net have become intolerable in their content and quantity,
I was reading a huffpost article the other day on my work computer on Firefox that doesn’t have an ad blocker. The page was refreshing with new ads every 5 seconds and took up like 20% more CPU power than before I opened the page.
So huffpost is now in my mental blocklist.
Yeah I’ve always been on firefox and I haven’t noticed a single thing change during the last year of all this hubbub about Youtube.
Youtube is fine for me, never stopped working here on firefox with ublock origin, but twitch though, yesterday I couldn’t watch any stream for 5 seconds without a error that only went away after turning everything off and letting the ads flow.
Check out TTV LOL PRO. It’s available on Firefox and Chrome and blocks all the ads on Twitch. Very rarely I’ll get a purple “streamer is taking an ad break” screen, but I haven’t seen an ad in quite a while.
I was using video-swap-new from the ad solutions GitHub for months, only recently this happened, such a shame.
TTV LOL does it via a proxy. You can set it up so that it only proxies ads. As far as Twitch knows, you’re still being served ads.
Ive been using the vaft script permalink with no issues, as recently as last night.
Same here. Firefox and uBlock Origin. My son uses Chrome with uBlock Origin and was having problems. Constantly and me to check and never a problem. I mostly only watch YouTube on ReVanced
I had that issue, then got a user agent switcher and made my firefox on linux look like chrome on windows and I have no issues. Using ublock origin
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.
My YouTube use is going down because the algorithm absolutely sucks now. I went to the gaming tab 2 hours after the state of play and it was nowhere to be found. But outdated years old crap was being shown.
But never had any ad issues with ublock origin or revanced.
If I had to watch ads, I would not use youtube. Period.
This. My preferred way of catching up to my favorite channels nowadays is watching their content on LibreTube with AdBlock and SponsorBlock on and supporting them on Patreon if they have one.
Yeah, recently had my Android with adblockers break, and my YT consumption is almost non-existent now as I watch more on mobile devices than on PC.
As an aside, if anyone has any advice for a ReVanced-like app for iOS, I’m all ears. I miss my Pixel 🥲
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.
The cpu bombing actually wasn’t Youtube, it was adblock plus (if thats what you were using)
Nope, I use ublock origin.
and never had a problem of youtube impacting games before.
I don’t know how true that is about YouTube intentionally CPU bombing ad block users specifically.
I will say though that websites run by big tech companies getting much heavier and more poorly optimized is ultimately just a fact of life. They don’t care about optimization, in fact it benefits them more that people have the latest and greatest hardware so that’s what they’re going to target. Ultimately that means that these websites will get slower on older hardware with time, and people will rely more and more on alternative frontends to access content, and it won’t really matter if you have ad blockers or not (*turning it off on a bloated site that is bogging down your CPU might actually make it worse).
Still using Firefox + ublock origin + sponsorblock. I’ve not seen an ad on YouTube for years.
On my phone I’m using Tubular, a fork of NewPipe with Sponsorblock integration.
Yeah ditto, been working fine for me
Same, on phone Newpipe works fine for me so far.
Is Tubular an Android only thing? I can’t find it. I’m still looking for an iOS solution.
You can use Yattee with this guide
Will try this tonight. Thanks!
If this doesn’t work for you, I have another (not as great) option that I used to use, back when I was using iOS. You can find a Invidious or Piped instance you like and a shortcut to it on your home screen. Obviously, that’s not as great as having a nice native app, but it works.
Seen plenty of people talking about the crazy ads they see on Youtube. Right wing propaganda, blatant grifting, scams… Folding Ideas has done not one but two videos talking about the ads he saw and picking them apart. Surely the people complaining about these ads know adblockers exist right? Why don’t they use them? I’m sure there are several reasons but, it’s been a known quantity for decades that you have the power to control how many and what kind of ads you see.
Adblocker will die when there’s no more ads to see.
Youtube still works fine with uBlock Origin. I’ve had the adblock detection pop up a few times, but updating the filters fixed it every time. I will never uninstall my ad blocker. The web is not usable without it.
Are the adblocker-detection bits a chrome/ium-only thing? I use firefox w/ ublock origin and I’ve never gotten any
I’ve gotten it on Firefox this week.
Since I very rarely comment on anything, the solution is generally to just log out of my account.
I need to learn the filter truck mentioned above.
filter truck
The what now?
Filter update. No clue how autocorrect got truck out of that.
Perhaps you originally meant to write trick?
Yeah I’m normally logged in ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah I have my adblocker disabled on edge on my work laptop as it messes with my web dev.
I accidentally used it for general browsing and I couldn’t believe what people put up with! It’s like a totally different internet.
that effect is amplified in areas with only shit-tier internet, like half of rural america.
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.
For those of us who can’t code their own extensions: LibRedirect does this for other sites as well, not just YouTube.
Oh, ty. This will replace a few extensions for me.
Very cool! I’m walking this same route, but with LibRedirect and Invidious Instance Selector Firefox addons. Maybe libraries can do community video-hosting and moderation? But please, no more businesses
Have you tried LibRedirect? It works for quite a bit more than just youtube. I personally love it for the fandom mirrors.
I’m not familiar with yewtu.be, but couldn’t you accomplish the the same thing with a simple Host File entry in your operating system? Get the IP of yewtu.be (by pinging it which I just did to get 104.244.72.25), create an entry that says:
youtube.com 104.244.72.25So when your OS goes to find youtube.com, it gets directed to the IP of yewtu.be
No, the browser would still send YouTube.com as the host header. While yewtu.be could be configured to allow this to work, the TLS cert would not and the browser would get upset.
Your browser doesn’t check SSL certificates?
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.
Not only did I not uninstall my adblocker, I also switched to the Invidious front-end to avoid any anti-adblocking scripts, and I can also download videos now, and get no trackers at all.
Same here, it made me finally add some extra blocking on my router.
