uBlock Origin has 36,000,000 users according to Google and ABP has 46,000,000 users. Another 13,000,000 use AdGuard and 67,000,000 use AdBlock (the crappy one, but nonetheless, it blocks YouTube ads).
Also on Firefox there are 7,780,587 uBO users. Checkmate
I use uBlock origin on firefox. All my devices are always connected through a VPN with all the ad and tracker blocks turned on.
I am a YouTube premium subscriber.
There are dozens of us… dozens!!!
Imagine being me and paying for premium and using ublock + revanced.
At the end of the day, I think I get 10 dollars in value a month, and I know hosting data isn’t free.
Edit: Right after I submitted I read the comment before me. Sorry about saying the exact same thing again 😅
I wouldn’t ever give Google a single penny. Instead, I pay for Nebula, allowing me to watch high quality videos and documentaries while supporting indie creators. And it’s just $5/month.
I will probably put my money where my mouth is, and get a nebula subscription
Not enough content on Nebula. I subscribed because of a couple YouRubers I follow, but there’s just not much there (at least that I watch).
Thank you for being this way.
I think platform greed is awful, but I think consumer greed is something that largely goes unacknowledged.
Even though I’ve been ‘over’ the genre for more than a decade, I still buy Japanese shmups when they appear on Steam - at one time they could only be found on obscure JP Warez sites, forget legally here. I do it out of a sense of something owed for past joy, and never play the Steam ver.
I’m also hypocritical to a degree. I can only afford to support so much and I don’t pay for everything, just what I would have paid for anyways. Perhaps there is some self-satisfying logic built in there lol
| Chrome Web Store | Firefox Add-ons | Microsoft Edge Add-ons | Opera add-ons | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| uBlock Origin | 36,000,000 | 7,780,587 | 10,000,000 | 12,686,907 | 66,467,494 |
| uBlock Origin Lite | 70,000 | 3,145 | 3,000 | N/A | 73,145 |
| uBlock | 700,000 | N/A | 10,000 | N/A | 710,000 |
| AdNauseam | N/A | 74,478 | 10,000 | 210,616 | 295,094 |
| AdBlock Plus | 46,000,000 | 4,064,146 | 10,000,000 | 50,844,211 | 110,908,357 |
| AdBlock | 67,000,000 | 1,206,627 | N/A | N/A | 68,206,627 |
| AdGuard | 13,000,000 | 1,053,029 | 8,000,000 | 10,872,145 | 32,925,174 |
| Total | 162,770,000 | 14,182,012 | 28,023,000 | 74,613,879 | 279,588,891 |
Source: Official data from extension stores
This table does not include Safari extensions, browser extensions installed through Linux package managers like the firefox-ublock-origin package on Arch Linux, browsers with built in adblockers like LibreWolf or Brave, modded YouTube mobile apps like Vanced/Revanced on Android, uYou for iOS, alternative frontends like Invidious or Piped, desktop clients like FreeTube, other mobile apps like Newpipe, Libretube or Yattee or other adblocking solutions.
Now deduplicate the numbers because I have it installed on 7 browser profiles.
If we also count other (less popular) adblockers, the Microsoft Edge addon store, browsers that come with pre-installed adblockers like Librewolf and Brave, people who use the package manager on their Linux distro to install browser extensions, alternative YouTube clients like Vanced/Revanced, Newpipe and Libretube as well as alternative frontends like Invidious and FreeTube, I’m pretty sure we still come out at over 100 million.
Watch how they steadily increase the price now (which they’ve already been doing)
It went up like four bucks this month for me this past month. I feel like I am in a no-win situation. I want to support the authors of the videos and music I like, make the platform sustainable, and I hate ads and data harvesting. There doesn’t seem to be reasonable way to satisfy all three objectives (or even two).
I’m mostly in the same boat with supporting the creators, however I don’t really like Google to be honest. I end up supporting creators outside the platform, such as via Patreon or by watching on Nebula. Most of my YT consumption is done via NewPipe, Piped and Freetube
There’s a little part of me that likes the fact that YouTube is burning a hole in Google’s finances tbh lol
Patreon for the ones you really like, and substituting watching my own content on Plex is how I’m weening myself off YouTube.
Unfortunately, anymore, even if you pay, companies (especially googie) are STILL harvesting and selling your data… I don’t know if there’s a way to avoid it without either unplugging entirely or going full in on dark web and anonymous browsing techniques, and even then, your data will still be harvested from other people in your life
If it wasn’t as freaking high as it is there would be a lot more premium users. Every other streaming service is full of professionally made movies and TV shows. YouTube is absolutely chock-full of berate crap where they’re barely paying anybody but the top 1%. It’s a grift. It should be priced with the absolute cheapest services out there.
The price makes a little more sense if you factor in it also includes YouTube music, which puts it more on par with a premium Spotify subscription, with the benefit of no ads on YouTube. Which is basically how I got YouTube premium, I was already paying a monthly fee for Google Play music as it was at the time, and the upgrade to add YouTube premium was only £2 extra a month.
Sure but a LOT of us don’t want the music service and have never used it once. People like me aren’t costing them a penny on music and if they offered a plan without music I’d jump in an instant.
I was in the same boat for ages and was happy paying as I kept the original rate. Then they bumped it by almost 50% end of December. Quit before the change took effect and have been using ad block ever since. The ONLY thing I miss is YouTube music as I’ve gotten too lazy to rip the remixes/soundtracks that aren’t on other streaming services.
While YouTube doesn’t commission, much, content it does store disproportionately more data. A streaming site has maybe 1,000,000 hours of content. That amount of content is uploaded to YouTube every day. It’s a totally different business model.
And, I don’t think I should be the one paying for that.
They should charge minor storage fees to the creators and uploaders. You pay to put your content up there if people watch it you get paid back as many multiples as necessary. It would be a fantastic method to reduce the amount of trash video stored up there that nobody ever watches.
And it still doesn’t have sponsorblock. Free is more feature rich than paid. Hahaha
I was using revanced but it quit working for me. I figured Google finally killed it off somehow.
Edit: am idiot and was thinking of YouTube vanced. Just found revanced and got things going again. Thanks!
This “Article” is short on details, And according to this article Google did not reveal data about subscriptions in the recent earnings call. I can only think this a PR piece to fluff up Google’s shares and discourage critics. Unless Google can be confident enough to explain which regions added subscribers and how much of such a subscription was part of a bundle… We can’t conclude that their anti-adblocking measures and price hikes were successful.
Example: India would fluff up numbers without adding as much revenue (bundles are common and subscription prices are low) than NA or EU
Grayjay, revanced, libretube, newpipe, youtube piped, youtube invidious, and uBlock origin 👀
Nebula is pretty cool too. It’s $5/month, but it’s run by indie creators, not some big tech company and you get access to some really great content. And you can use Grayjay to access it.
