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’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.
I’m actually going to disagree there. Where I live there is a monthly magazine delivered free to anyone who wants it. The magazine is 100% adverts and is paid for entirely by the people advertising. It’s very useful when you’re trying to find a plumber of sell a car or whatever.
EDIT: But you were probably being hyperbolic and I will agree that I dislike to see adverts anywhere that I’m not actively searchibg them out
In other words, the yellow pages.
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.
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 we need a coalition of sites that agree a single page serve is fine, they don’t need tons of garbage running in the background.
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.
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.
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.
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 (default lists, reports 116k network filters), 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 lists).
- 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).
Never saw ads against adblock. I use firefox with ublock, and alterbative sponsorblock clients for youtube on android :)
This is what I use also, but youtube stopped it and blocked the videos. The work around was opening in an incognito window.
Never had any problems. Did you used to log into an account, maybe that makes a difference?
Adblocker will die when there’s no more ads to see.
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/
Well I’m not seeing any ads, so I’d say yes
I never even noticed their ‘battle’ using YouTube revanced. (only youtube client I use)
uBlock seems to have won the arms race, since whenever I had problems it worked again after updating it.
Yeah, never noticed a thing of this “war” because of FF and uBlock origin.
It all just kept working, including on Youtube.
I saw the Youtube banner telling me it detected an ad blocker and wouldn’t let me watch a lot for about a week. Now it’s been over two months with nothing but smooth sailing on μBlock Origin. I’m even back to being able to block Shorts from appearing on my sub feed, where before it seemed like any YT-specific filters would let them detect the blocker.
How do you block shorts? Please and thanks.
Here’s my list of uBO filters that hides Shorts from Youtube
! Hide all videos containing the phrase “#shorts”
youtube.com##ytd-grid-video-renderer:has(#video-title:has-text(#shorts))
youtube.com##ytd-grid-video-renderer:has(#video-title:has-text(#Shorts))
youtube.com##ytd-grid-video-renderer:has(#video-title:has-text(#short))
youtube.com##ytd-grid-video-renderer:has(#video-title:has-text(#Short))
! Hide all videos with the shorts indicator on the thumbnail
youtube.com##ytd-grid-video-renderer:has([overlay-style=“SHORTS”])
youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:has([overlay-style=“SHORTS”])
youtube.com##ytd-video-renderer:has([overlay-style=“SHORTS”])
youtube.com##ytd-item-section-renderer.ytd-section-list-renderer[page-subtype=“subscriptions”]:has(ytd-video-renderer:has([overlay-style=“SHORTS”]))
! Hide shorts button in sidebar
youtube.com##ytd-guide-entry-renderer:has-text(Shorts)
youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-entry-renderer:has-text(Shorts)
! Hide shorts section on homepage
youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer:has(#rich-shelf-header:has-text(Shorts))
youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer:has(.ytd-reel-shelf-renderer:has-text(Shorts))
! Hide shorts tab on channel pages
! Old style
youtube.com##tp-yt-paper-tab:has(.tp-yt-paper-tab:has-text(Shorts))
! New style (2023-10)
youtube.com##yt-tab-shape:has-text(/^Shorts$/)
! Remove empty spaces in grid
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row,#contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display: contents !important)