My wife and I have noticed that all our computers today have been showing quite a few ads on youtube. We have ublock on just about every device and Firefox on a majority of them. Anyone else having the same issue?
I’ve heard that YouTube has started experimenting with injecting ads into the actual video stream rather than getting JavaScript in the browser to swap between video and ad. Specifically for the purpose of breaking ad blocking. (Particularly to break ad blocking on Open Source apps/clients like NewPipe.) Though I haven’t seen it myself.
There are a lot of doomsayers saying that YouTube ad blocking is a thing of the past if they do that for all videos/users, but I don’t think that’s the case. Ad blocking will catch up given some time.
I will download YouTube videos and manually snip the ads out myself if it comes to it.
In theory, Sponsorblock could evolve to download a new video multiple times, check what frames match each copy, and use that data to skip to the next matching frame when users watch something.
This would overcome video stream ad injection even if every ad was a different length and in a different location each time someone watched the video.
There’s give and take. If they lay the ads right into the stream at random points with no indicators and if you’re due for an ad, they only serve you ad until you’ve consumed that time. So the apps turn to buffering. You pause the video for 10 seconds then you run it at 95% speed. At some point we’ll end up predownloading everything at 1x speed with ads and watching it later with an ad skip algo on the canned video.
They can’t stop you from stripping ads, but they can make it not work in realtime. You’ll have to have a plan on what to watch and lose some time when you’re discovering random content.
Twitch ad block isn’t perfect but instead of getting an ad I get the purple “ad broken” screen for a minute so it’s better than nothing I guess.
I’m not seeing any ads on any computers today I think I may have been part of the ab testing. Fun times.
Sometimes you have to clear the cache and update the lists manually to fix it.
I’ve been using the Freetube client for several months and have not opened YT in my browser the entire time. Love it, and highly recommend it.
How long has it been since you updated uBlock? If I go about 2 weeks without restarting Firefox, they start showing up for me. A quick restart of FF and updating uBlock has always worked for me.
Let us know if it works or not.
Question: how do you update extensions?
I’m curious because I normally just update Firefox when it notifies me and normally reboot my machine once a day and I notice I never ever have seen ads with uBlock Origin + Firefox, not even on my phone.
Doesn’t uBlock Origin update automatically?
Update ublock
Yes that happened to me the other day. It was related to some Invidious fsckery they were also pulling, but I didn’t see any update or steps to resolve on ublock.
It eventually went away - for now. Frickin’ monopolies, right?
FF has been giving me trouble with youtube recently. Vivaldi with uBlock Origin has been solid.
Latest version of Firefox?
