The adblocking will continue until transparency of content delivery improves.
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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Ads are pretty evil anyway.
They're legal harrassment
Banksy’s Letter on Advertising presents it in better words than I ever could.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
Banksy
Goddamn, this is unfathomably based, thank you for sharing.
The adblocking will continue ~~until transparency of content delivery improves~~.
MFs in my IT group at work took away our adblockers. Now I can't look at ANYTHING off the corporate teet without my machine dying due to the sheer volume of ads on the average website
I believe that was their intention, then.
So they go and blame ad blockers for the decrease at the same time they cause said "decline"? Classic.
Get ready for “login, like and subscribe guys” and dont forget to smash that login button
So do advertisers still have to pay for impressions or clicks if the viewer isn't logged in?
Something tells me Google's just going to pocket the difference now.
From different youtubers self reporting they say the amount of money they make hasn't changed, so it appears they still play the ads but not count their views on YT
So far I've seen RedLetterMedia blame Restricted mode. Then saw SpiffingBrit refute that. Some comments I saw blamed ad blockers.
Then I checked out, not my problem. It's a black box everyone is trying to solve.
Restricted mode is only turned on if that account does only watch restricted videos.
Wasn't it already proven to be an ad-blocker update? I though thet blocked the url that counts the views. So no views are counted
I did some youtubing last week and saw three people claiming that three different theories were already proven.
I find it crazy that the client would call an API endpoint to register a view. Then we could just call that end point in a script to arbitrarily inflate the view count, can we not? How do they prevent this exploit? Wouldn't it be better if the server registered the view after a certain amount of the video was delivered?
Why is that crazy?
You don't want to register a view just because the backend sent a 200 response for the video.
You want to register a view when the video has loaded, it has begun to play, and quite likely after some arbitrary percentage of the video.
This is all front end information. How much of the video was made available to the front end to play isn't really relevant.
Alright, not "crazy", but this doesn't explain how they combat exploiting this by just calling the end point.
That's more or less how it works, but that's still an additional call. If Google is not tying it directly into segment download requests, then it could potentially be blocked without disrupting playback.
I have no insight into the details of the inner workings. If I download a video with yt-dlp, does it increase the view count? If not, then it's a broken system, yeah?
If I download a video with yt-dlp, does it increase the view count? If not, then it's a broken system, yeah?
I'm very curious to know how they register a view, yeah. The only true measurement is the video reaching someone's retina or ears, to measure attention, which is impossible at a large scale as of yet. 🥲
They've been using AI to detect things like that for a long time. (AI in general not LLMs as far as I know.
All I can say is my feed has been shit since it happened.
I knew something was odd. I watch youtube without an account and in the past few days, when trying to watch some of my favorite channels youtube prompted me to “lognin to prove” I’m not a bot. This was only for a handful of channels, others seem to work fine.
A German YouTuber tested it with an unlisted video, I can’t find it as of now but I do find a lot of deleted videos in my liked ones…
How exactly? Because if it was just watching the video and looking at the view count shown under the video as others making this claim have done: That thing isnt updated in real time and also fuzzes the real number making this way of testing misleading.
I am not sure about the AdSense metrics page, tho.
I've heard before that you need to wait 24h before checking the view count again. Although, yeah, I believe you can get more up-to-date counts as the uploader.
I don't understand how anyone used YouTube anymore. I'm not going to spend 5 minutes solving a captcha every time I want to watch a 2 minute video.
I've literally never seen a captcha on YouTube
Edit: Also, I generally watch 30+ minute YouTube videos from people I'm specifically subscribed to
That's because you're logged into an account. And they track and make money from you
It's not about being logged out. Something about your browser configuration is messed up, or your ip address is blacklisted, giving you frequent captchas.
On a clean browser and IPV4 you get zero captchas without being logged in
No, something about your setup is messed up. Likely they can fingerprint and identity you.
If your IP address were shared by many users and you had a properly configured browser to defeat fingerprinting, then they torture you with captchas to force you to login, so they can profit off of you
I use FreeTube frequently as well
I've literally never had to do that? And with uBlock Origin I don't see ads at all.
That means they're tracking you
OK. I'd already assumed they are.
just heads up if you're getting captchas on YT you'll probably start getting those on other Google services over time too.
it snowballs like this: YouTube decides you're a bot => you use less YouTube => Google/Alphabet gets less information/fingerprints of you => Google Search decides you're a bot => you switch to a different search engine => Google Maps decides you're a robot ...
I pay for it, because I've always watched a lot of it and I got used to "YouTube Premium" when it was called "YouTube Red" and came free with "Google Music" (now called "YouTube Music").
adblocker
The experience on iOS using Safari+AdGuard+BakingSoda+Vinegar or simply the Orion browser is flawless. No ads, play videos with locked screen.
I saw Josh Strife Hayes talking about this and I think he was collecting some data to potentially do a video on it? Will be interesting to see the results and if they match up with this.
Yes! The one I mentioned quoted Josh and went further with his research