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YouTube Reportedly Bypassing Ad Blockers On Google Chrome

Posted by samzenpus on from the watch-this dept.

An anonymous reader writes: YouTube users have lit up twitter today, angry about an apparent change of policy by Google, which now seems to be showing ads in front of videos on YouTube even when using Adblock. Neowin reports: "Google's workaround seems to be applicable to all similar extensions and isn't exclusive to just AdBlock Plus. The company has not stopped at just skirting the extension, however. Users with AdBlock enabled will now have to see full-length video ads with no option to skip them half-way through, a feature YouTube has offered for a very long time. The only way to get the option back is to disable AdBlock, or to whitelist YouTube."

8 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Only affects "Youtube app" in chrome by watermark · · Score: 5, Informative

    FTFA, this change only affects the YouTube "app" installed in Chrome. Uninstall the app and you're golden.

    1. Re:Only affects "Youtube app" in chrome by reve_etrange · · Score: 3, Informative

      Chrome "apps" are essentially just bookmarks, which sometimes interact with a specialized extension. I guess the idea is continuity with ChromeOS or something.

      As to why you'd need it, I have no answer.

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      .: Semper Absurda :.
    2. Re:Only affects "Youtube app" in chrome by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Informative

      It makes YouTube load faster by caching much of the HTML, CSS and images locally, and by having some of the Javascript pre-compiled. That's all Chrome apps are, just local caches for web sites that make them open faster.

      The extension API that is used by AdBlock doesn't allow extensions to screw with stuff cached in apps, for security reasons. Recently Google moved some of the advertising code from the YouTube site into the app, where it can't be blocked. So now AdBlock just removes the "skip advert" button, but not the ad delivery Javascript code itself because that bit is in the app.

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      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. My YouTube ad revenue went up by lhaeh · · Score: 4, Informative

    From the twitter posts in the linked article, it seems this started on the 5th. My most recent ad revenue data from YouTube is for that day, I made $11.68, normally I make $5-$8 per day. I've been seeing some spikes recently, but I assumed that was from heavy back to school advertising, maybe it could have been from this.

    Any other tubers out there notice something like this?

  3. Re: Back to Firefox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Chrome's extension capability is not as powerful as with Firefox. That is why the NoScript guys never developed their plugin for Chrome. In Firefox, you can pretty much completely change the browser into something else entirely with a plugin. Chrome, in comparison, is quite limited.

  4. Re: Back to Firefox by reve_etrange · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is false. The developer of NoScript says that they are working with him to make sure extensions may still alter native behavior.

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    .: Semper Absurda :.
  5. Re:Back to Firefox by reve_etrange · · Score: 3, Informative

    Indeed. Giorgio Maone, the developer of NoScript, says everything is OK.

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    .: Semper Absurda :.
  6. Re:Back to Firefox by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Informative

    You forget that early versions of Chrome didn't support ad-blocking. There was a bug report asking for necessary features to be added to the extension API (the ability to filter URLs and the DOM before network requests were made) and Google obliged. They actually did extra work to support ad-blocking.

    If you read some comments below you can see that this was just an unintentional thing, only affecting the YouTube app.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC