If you see an ad, close the tab.
Literally the only way they will learn. I really don’t understand how we as a society have accepted ads as a necessary evil. We all hate them, but we all also make them work. It’s horrible.
I’ve been wondering for a while where the point of diminishing returns is. Surely, at some point, ads become aggressive enough to have an adverse effect on advertisers?
I often wonder how ads of any kind have ever worked, unless it was an ad for something we had already planned on buying.
Before their media blitz campaign, Hormel’s Spam was eaten in perhaps 20% of households; after the campaign it was closer to 70%.
Ads do work, if you do them right. People go for what they’ve heard of over what they haven’t.
Ads are super effective. If you have something to buy, but you don’t know much about it, you will tend towards buying the thing that was advertised to you more often than not just because you are more familiar with it over other things. You might not stick with it, but being the first thing someone tries is huge.
I don’t know why my brain said this was memeable, but here we are
deleted by creator
The number of ads I had popping up while trying to read that article isn’t discouraging me from using adblockers.
This is actually one of my favorite websites to browse on desktop through my VPN and extreme DNS blocking solution. The console just fills with blocked content and JavaScript errors, it really warms my heart.
adblockers cause views to drop
Nothing causes me to drop a video like an ad I can’t put up with, like a political ad. This is some BULLSHIT.
Tldr: youtube forced ai into video monitoring and it keeps killing videos it shouldn’t, so instead of saying Ai is bad they’re blaming af blockers because why not lie when there’s no repercussions?
YouTube views are dropping because they are using AI to vet and cull age innappropriate content from minors. the problem is the ai is very bad at its job and marks way too many videos as not advertiser friendly, which effectively kills YouTube promoting that video in feeds. this is the default view for new accounts, so you have to specifically turn off parental controls to see a normal feed. this started happening about 4 months ago. a number of channels I watch have made comments about this, including Redlettermedia
I don’t understand:
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What is ‘AI in video monitoring?’
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The article mentions literally nothing about this, so where did that come from?
the article provides one “official” explanation for views dropping, and i am citing an alternative explanation from the perspective of creators themselves who see the analytical data and the judgments being past on their videos.
Ok, but that’s not a TLDR of the article.
the tldr was for my wordy comment not the article. why would i summarize the article?
Because when you comment, “TLDR” under an article, it’s assumed to be a “TLDR” of the article. It also doesn’t make sense to say TLDR was a summary of your long comment because you didn’t make a long comment to summarize, you just jumped right in with TLDR.
ok i am so sorry i didn’t comment right comment policeman are you going to give me a ticket
get a life
LMAO, whatever salves your literacy’s hurt ego.
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This is hearsay from victims looking for a reason of their suffering.
Lemme try and feel sorry for my cartoonishly rich tech overlords real quick…
It’s true. Having to constantly update some adblockers and ways to evade ads in youtube made me realize shitty youtube videos are not worth the effort and I barely use it nowadays.
I’m sure that the number of times I’ve decided “nah I don’t need to see that” after being told an ad blocker violated YouTube’s terms of service has absolutely nothing to do with it either.
Even on a computer without ad blocker (work laptop, chrome browser)
the number of times i say “nah i don’t need to see that” as soon as thes annoying ads comes up before the video…
The decline probably has very little to do with ad blockers.
The decline was very sudden, almost instantaneous, and can be traced back to the exact date a block list, used by most major desktop ad blockers, added the YouTube View Counter API endpoint to their list.
But sure… nothing to do with ad blockers.
For many years biggest online threats were criminals and malware. Today the biggest threats are big companies, especially Google. Everyday we have to “fight” against it because it tries to steal all our data and even more.
Google know who they’re streaming videos to. They know this from the back-end. They absolutely do not require a script running in the browser to phone home about it in order to count “views”. All the telemetry they need they can get from existing traffic; the additional telemetry supplied by scripts is mostly just for Bad Reasons and it’s morally fine to block it.
If the Google war on ad blocking meant the ad blockers accidently blocked something everyone wants its still Google fault.
Everything was fine until Google decided to change how everything works over and over again to get people to watch the awful ads they let on their platform.
Googlees don’t “let” ads on their platform. Ads are the entire reason for the existence of their platform.
They could hire some people to vet the ads.
A company taking responsibility for the ads they serve? That sounds like communism to me!
Didn’t age verification - also recently implemented - cause youtube views to drop?
Here’s a case of it very well explained.
It was the first thing most people assumed was the culprit, as it silently enabled Restricted Mode, but since the biggest difference came from Computer views, despite the age verification happening on all platforms, that is strong evidence against that having any impact
It’s gotten to the point where I have to re-load each YT tab three times before the video ever starts playing - only because I use uBlock.
Still better than watching ads, but it is getting annoying.
I switched from Chrome to MS Edge and don’t have that YouTube ad-blocking issue with uBlock anymore. Other than that, MS Edge works exactly like Chrome.
MS Edge is Chrome, with a slight MS reskin.
MS Edge allows extensions that Chrome does not. It still fully supports uBlock Origin.
I did not know that - but surely since it’s based on Chrome, that means they’re going to have to follow suit at some point?
The Chromium browser code is open source.
I thought the changes were to do with manifest v3, and that was part of chromium. I didn’t realise that was added to chrome after the fact.
I have a theory that YT deliberately makes you wait the length an ad would have been if you have uBlock Origin installed. Ive just let it “buffer” for 30 seconds or so and it will eventually load the video.
I think this is true, and I still prefer it to an ad. Even if it’s longer than the ad would have been.
For those curious what “adblockers said really happened”:
[AdGuard] suggested that the issue may have been linked to popular community-maintained filter lists like EasyList and uBlock’s Quick Fixes.
A new filter rule added to EasyList on August 11, 2025 targeted telemetry requests thought to be tied to YouTube’s view attribution and analytics.
That rule remained in place until September 10, when it was temporarily disabled.
A similar change was added to uBlock’s Quick Fixes on September 10 and removed on September 17.
OK. I mean Fuck Alphabet anyhow, but this means a youtuber who relies on view counts for monetary income (I guess) would actually have reason to worry about adblockers?
Again, I’m not saying I’m against adblockers or even this particular feature. And I very well see what Google is doing here, trying to get their creators up in arms against adblocking. I just want to know if this is debunkable or if youtubers would have a genuine argument here.
I did not really understand above explanation. I guess I need it ELI5.
Basically Youtube instead of counting views via actual requests for the videos instead uses a separate call that essentially says “hey, someone watched this video”. All the ad blockers rather than use a hard coded list of URLs to block which would quickly go stale instead use one of a couple different 3rd party lists the most popular of which is EasyList. EasyList decided to block the URL that youtube uses to register views on the principal that it was a privacy violation because it not only registers “hey someone watched this” but also captures exactly who watched it which allows Google to track your viewing habits.
