Google has begun testing a more aggressive approach to users trying to watch videos on the YouTube video platform with ad blockers and without a paid
Advertising companies gunna advertise, hell or high water. Sometimes it’s easy to forget, but all the major players in tech are just advertising companies. I use a pihole running in my network to deep six all advertising traffic in a way that the website doesn’t know it’s happening.
However, I subscribe to youtube premium for access to youtube music (it’s positively amazing if you love newly released EDM), and as a happy perk, no advertising videos for me.
I feel like Google has been cheeky for a while now in that they are either A) running ads off their own servers, same that show the video itself (so you can’t block the request without also blocking the video) or B) they’re hitting up their own DNS servers (ignoring system DNS settings) using DNS-over-HTTPS which you can’t necessarily block, and which could easily rotate IPs behind a reverse proxy. They could just pass the current IP in a response field from the initial HTTP request for the video and then use that IP to make whatever additional HTTP calls they need for the DNS records for the ad servers, bypassing PiHole or any other local DNS server entirely, since they could just open a connection directly with the IP (both for DNS and for content streams, ads or otherwise)
Because my PiHole (and/or AdGuardHome) seemed to work (or at least disrupt) everything except the YT app.
Now I have YT Premium anyway so it’s a non-issue for me as well. Makes me wonder how many other companies are going to do this and what can be done about it?
I subscribed back when it was Google Music + Youtube RED as a perk. Worth it to me to nix Youtube ads and listen to music all day (also without ads). There will always be a contingent of people that will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make ad-supported stuff not have ads, but in the case of music and YT videos, pay up or watch the ads. If there was a reasonably priced option to subscribe to more than a single newspaper service, I’d be paying for that instead of doing the javascript disablement dance.
That really hits on how I feel about it. I can subscribe to a single service for music and get it bundled with Youtube with no ads, very worth it. But every single new paper in the world wants you to pay a month fee too. Most of the time I’m running into paywalled new paper articles from a ton of providers, essentially, I can’t sub to an infinite number of services no matter what the corporations think.
Just look at where steaming video ended up! It used to be Netflix, only game in town worth subbing to, huge old movie catalog and new stuff being added all the time. Now, it’s ala cart, there are more streaming services then I can remember to list here, and every single one costs about the same amount. I hate how the internet is now.
100% agree. And I also have YouTube premium previously YouTube red previously YouTube music.
Came for the music, stayed for the ad free experience.
1000% this! I’ve been subscribed since it was called Google music, and you had the option to upload your own library of MP3’s and access them via streaming. When they rolled it into Youtube, it was a happy accident for me. Hell, I haven’t seen ads on youtube in so long, I forgot they even existed!
