YouTube and Anti-Adblock: A Complicated Story

Recently, YouTube has made a lot of noise online by implementing an anti-adblocker on YouTube. I’ve decided to write out my thoughts here, as I’ve seen far too many one-sided arguments that don’t consider one or many of the extremely complex parts that make up this situation.

To be upfront: I pay for YouTube Premium, and I have been for years. It’s worth it to me. I also use adblock religiously. So, I’m not really on either extreme.

This post isn’t done yet. I have a lot of thoughts and I’m writing them out some at a time.

Table of Contents

The situation

What’s going on with YouTube?

YouTube recently instituted an anti-adblocker on YouTube. This is code that monitors YouTube’s ads and makes sure their content isn’t being filtered out, and if it detects that it is (either by a browser’s privacy protections, or by an adblock extension), it will stop the video from loading after a while.

Zhenyi Tan gives a pretty good overview of how it works, although I don’t fully agree with the rest of the blog post.

Why now?

Simply put, YouTube needs money. I’ll go into more details about why YouTube needs money in the later parts of this post, but the economy is stagnating and inflation is going up. YouTube needs to stay afloat, so they are trying to extract value out of their userbase.

I still want to block ads. What should I do?

The team over at uBlock Origin (doing amazing work) still remain the best adblock around, bar none.

They don’t accept donations, completely decoupling them from any financial incentive and preventing any situations like the “Acceptable Ads” nonsense AdBlock Plus pulled in the past. It’s open source, meaning anyone can audit and improve the code. It’s incredibly configurable, and can behave exactly how you want it to. It even performs better than virtually any adblocker out there. It has my unequivocal recommendation for the best adblocker out there.

(Don’t use it with other adblockers / “stack” it. I used to, but the uBlock Team recommends against it.)

They even have a few dedicated volunteers tackling the problem. At the time of writing, there’s a weekly pinned thread on r/uBlockOrigin with the most up-to-date instructions. A plea, though: PLEASE do not bother them with questions like “IT’S NOT WORKING PLEASE HELP ME” until you’ve meaningfully tried to troubleshoot it yourself. MAKE SURE YOU FOLLOW THE GUIDE TO THE LETTER. They are overworked enough as is.

Anti-Adblock: Necessary or greedy?

Please, read this entire section so you can get an overview of everything I’m trying to say before you get angry and disagree with me. Nuance is everything here - this situation is incredibly complex.

The Necessary

YouTube is expensive - very, very expensive - to run.

YouTube, which is the biggest video hosting site in the world, still doesn’t make money. This is because video hosting is prohibitively expensive. Almost no one can make a meaningful competitor to YouTube - the words “free video hosting website” are basically an oxymoron unless you’re one of the biggest advertising companies in the world (Google).

YouTube didn’t have to block adblockers before, because they were constantly growing their userbase and revenue. But, we’ve reached the point where YouTube has captured literally the entire market for video (except China, where it’s banned, but that’s not really relevant here). They physically can’t GET more users without some sort of sinister propaganda campaign for people to have more children.

I’ve seen people argue that:

  1. YouTube benefits in immaterial ways, such as bolstering the ads business of Google or increasing Google’s reach over the internet.
  2. Big corporations are very good at hiding their profits, allowing them to not pay taxes - because they’re “not profitable”.

I will be completely honest: These are both true to some extent. I still don’t think they cancel out the fact that YouTube needs money, badly, or it will be forced to shut down. I’m sure Google is profiting in some way off YouTube, even if YouTube doesn’t make money on paper, because YouTube hasn’t shut down yet. If YouTube didn’t give them profit in other ways, there’s no way they would run the site. Still, they need money.

Yes, I fully agree that this is enshittification in full effect. (If you don’t know what that is, I recommend you read this article.) However, in the case of YouTube specifically, I think this is unavoidable - they have one distinct disadvantage that the other platforms don’t have: they are specifically a VIDEO HOSTING site that hosts long-form video.

TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. all don’t have this disadvantage. They are primarily social platforms. They have, at most, short-form video that’s maybe a minute long, which is way, way cheaper to host. These sites all have an easy way to stay profitable - they just want MORE profit. YouTube doesn’t have this luxury. They HAVE to make more money off their users, which means doing things the users won’t like.

The Greedy

But let’s also not delude ourselves into thinking YouTube is free from blame. While the above explains this move a little bit, Google is a publicly traded company.

By law, they are obligated to generate money for their shareholders. Corporations are greedy by law.

What does YouTube want out of this?

Now that we’ve explored the costs and benefits of adblock, let’s analyze why this decision was made in the first place. What is YouTube’s endgame here? Here’s a list of what I think their goals were with this move.

Obviously, the end goal of this move is to make more money. YouTube has a few means to this end.

Another Plan Moving Forward

Something other people often do is universally condemn YouTube’s anti-adblock. I really don’t think it’s useful or constructive to say YouTube

YouTube needs to make money, or it will die. So, here I am, attempting to offer my most concrete thoughts on what YouTube can do in the future that will both keep its users happy and its bills paid.

Here’s some other things that people have suggested or demanded that YouTube should do, and why I find them unrealistic:

There’s another topic to bring up here: people want relevant ads to them that they’re actually interested in. However, this necessarily means giving Google lots of data about you, in order to recommend you things that you want with uncanny precision. There’s a tradeoff here. I’ll talk more about this in the Privacy section below.

Other thoughts

Is Adblock piracy?

On one end, we have people claiming that it is not only moral to use adblock, it is our imperative to use it - that it is our duty to block ads.

On the other end, we have complete rubbish like this horrifyingly bad opinion piece titled “Why Using an Ad Blocker is Stealing” from Tom’s Guide. Seriously, my brain hurts after reading it. They would probably be on board with a mandatory eye tracker to force you to look at every ad.

Seriously, what were they thinking when they said “Every time you block an ad, what you’re really blocking is food from entering a child’s mouth”? That sentence alone made my brain’s education drop 2 grade levels.

Guess what? As with almost everything in life, the truth is somewhere between the two extremes. (I know, so insightful.)

Anyway, I’d answer the question of “is adblocking piracy” with another question: Does it matter?

(WIP)

Adblocking isn’t evil. Adblocking also isn’t holy. Let’s just treat adblock as what it is. A way to remove inconveniences from our eyesight

About privacy

The ad-supported Internet

Conclusion

That was a lot of words.

To sum it up, what I’m basically trying to say is: