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YouTube Shows Adblock Plus Users an Error Message Instead of Ads
An anonymous reader writes: Do you use YouTube with Adblock Plus? Some users have been getting the following message instead of ads: "An error occurred. Please try again later." The error message is only shown for the duration of the ad, meaning Adblock Plus is still technically getting the job done. But adblocking extensions typically block ads as well as remove them: For banner ads that means gaining back screen real estate on the webpage while for videos that means the content starts playing right away.
If you extrapolate the arms race out, I can see victory being that you time-shift the video while the ad-blocker lets the ad play to /dev/null.
They can't force me to watch the ads, because they can't force me to watch their content. I would give up their content before watching ads, the same way as I don't watch teevee with ads. But as long as they want it to be freely available, they can only temporarily frustrate the ad blockers.
It's not just the weird message that's the problem. In the background of the error screen is the 'snow' that we used to see on an analog TV between stations and I also see a hum bar slowly moving up or down. Where the hell is THAT coming from?
I didn't see any ads. I have adblocker with easylist and an anti-adblocker blocker list.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Hmm, ads possibly serving malware, or cat vidz. decisions decisions.
It is only a matter of time before Google tried to stop adblocking on Youtube. They were just waiting for Youtube to get all the marketshare. Next they will try to crack down on copyright violations. They didn't try too hard while they were trying to get all the marketshare.
Most likely it depends on which block rules that you use, not the AdBlock plug-in itself.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Oh shut up. I have Ublock origin and I'm getting this message on Firefox.
I'd rather enjoy a few seconds of a silent error message than enduring another stupid ad.
"YouTube Red is not currently available in Argentina".
If youtube doesn't care about offering their paid service in my country, it means they don't want my money. If they don't want my money, then I won't see their ads either.
Fuck google.
No, he is asking to do himself what the service does without buying the service.
You seem to be under the impression that if I use my computer to do the work of removing ads, it is the same as Youtube somehow doing the work. It is not and it is not using youtube's services without buying them either.
that's interesting. i've often gotten that error message, but I assumed it was a browser fail and used a different browser. Can I wait it out and then the add starts? that's a dirty business on goog's part. do no evil!
Google is well within their rights to do this. They offer a $10/mo service to go ad-free. There isn't any excuse to block ads on Youtube.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
It's pretty amazing. I don't own a TV, don't listen to radio, ane don't see any ads online. I have no fucking clue what movies are in theatres, what shows are on TV, or the names of up and coming celebrities. It is pure fucking BLISS.
Life is even more fantastic once you eradicate all that bullshit.
It doesn't matter which adblocker you use or which browser you use. I've been following this story closely, and this is what I've learned:
Whether or not you get this error (which lasts as long as an advertisement, by the way) depends on how many ads your YouTube account has blocked recently. For example, if you log out of your YouTube account you won't get the error. If you switch to a Google (or YouTube) account that you haven't used in a while, you won't get the error. And if a couple of days later you log back in with the original account, you won't get the error. But if you watch a bunch of videos with ads that get blocked, the error will start again.
And yes, it doesn't matter which adblocking software you use. uBlock users are reporting the error as well. YouTube support has basically said, "This is happening because of something we did, but it wasn't intentional. And since it wasn't intentional, we're not going to do anything about it, so you'll have to contact your adblocker's support."
You are welcome on my lawn.
I use Adblock Plus and don't see any ads or errors on Youtube. I use uBlock Origin on a different computer, not seeing ads or errors there either.
Oh "shut up" yourself I guess. I have adblock plus and while I do see that "error" message occasionally, it goes away if I reload the page.
I have my flash player set up to require me to explicitly let it run on sites I visit, and it's when I first let it start running that I get the error. After reloading the page after it's been given permission, things work normally.
youtube-dl does a good job of removing ads, as well as geo and age restrctions. I stopped using youtube when Google took it over because they fucked up commenting. It used to be fun, now it's not. If somebody sends me a link to a youtube video I'll just snatch it with youtube-dl. No ads, no geo resrictions, no age restrictions, no muss, no fuss.
Honestly, how Google could fuck up an existing good service like youtube is beyond my understanding, and yet they still did it.
because they can't force me to watch their content
That would seem to imply that, if they wish to force the ads, the remaining option is to simply not watch, rather than steal. In fact, the very next sentence confirms this:
I would give up their content before watching ads
Most people choose to build their strawmen from straw, you seem to have chosen to use willful ignorance. No matter, really, as both burn equally well.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
If ignorance burned as readily as straw, this world would have been purged of it long ago.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yeah their bullshit is getting kind of old. We should just all go back to posting videos on some store and forward network like netnews (Ha ha only serious.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Flash? Huh? Youtube still supports flash player video?
...
If ignorance burned as readily as straw, this world would have been purged of it long ago.
Yeah, just like the straw! Oh, wait...
The service is either free, or it is not. If they want to call it free, and show ads, they have no claim that viewing the ads are required. They can try to make sure they are displayed, but that is all.
People who really don't understand ethics seem to jump right onto the ad bandwagon, I wonder why that is? Maybe they're using their employer's "ethics" instead of having an honest discussion?
If watching the ads was required, then it would be false advertising to call it free. False advertising is something a crook does, it isn't even legal. If you simply go their web domain, and it shows the content, and you click on it, and you haven't had to agree to any contract, then any requirement at all that you try to place on me is unethical. You can try to show me an ad, but you can't require it. It is up to the website owner to either restrict their content to subscribers, or not.
I'm not "asking" for anything. They offer the service freely, so I use it in whatever way I want that is within the law. I'm happy to follow the law and not deface their website, harm their property, etc., but that is it. Those are the only restrictions that I would be bound to, and expecting more is an immoral and unethical attempt to hijack my prerogatives.
Simply "offering" a paid subscription does not prevent their freely available version from being freely available. If they want to lock that down, that is their prerogative; but they'll lose a lot of market share.
Run all the adds you want, but the second you probe my system, you cross the line. I have no interest in the crap you're peddling, and have every right to block your malware infested, tracking inserting and bandwidth stealing advertisements .
--- Keep the choice with the user..
That is one of those things where if they're that crazy or on that many hallucinogens to even do it, then I might very well believe that they thought they were somewhere else, like in a bathroom on a spaceship.
I believe them that it isn't intentional; they do have bugs in their other services. I can understand their point; they don't like ad-blockers or approve of them, and they have no reason to care about the bug.
I think it was polite of them to acknowledge that the unexpected behavior was correlated to some change that they made. If they say it was unintentional I believe them, because if it was on purpose, it would be within their rights, and if they were planning on pushing out this feature they would have no reason to be unclear about it.
I like this approach, because the guys like you that are free-loading off of web search or links will have to stay in the cache for the search to keep misleading users to you, and then when I don't see the content I can just add cache:// to the start of the address and view the content on a server that I have better relationship with.
Your plea at the end reminds me of the guys standing on the side of the freeway ramp with a sign, begging for money.
Yeah someone figured that out a while ago, well its nice to see the cause being identified (Guess they don't care THAT much about net neutrality afterall...)
But at least they figured out a solution already and this works for me.
Start a youtube video from link.
when it does not load, click on the right right sidebar videos.
that one loads fine (is it a bug? hope not)
Now press ALT + LEFT ARROW and poof your original video in all its glory. Works most times for me.
I actually thought it was flashblock screwing up but my wife has noticed it for months and complained that youtube is "unusable".
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on my home server
Most people don't have a home server, for one or more of the following reasons:
In each of these cases, it is often less hassle to use YouTube than to transcode a video into a dozen formats yourself and put them all in an S3 bucket. It's also far less hassle to leave ad sales to YouTube than to try to find sponsors to cover the cost of hosting your individual videos.
I usually write code hat check to see if the ad content was pushed out to the client. If not disables the site for that web browser and IP address for an hour.
Do BingBot and Googlebot retrieve ads? If not, enjoy being hard to find in search engines.
Besides, in the era of IPv4 address exhaustion, ISPs are using carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to put a hundred or a thousand users behind one IPv4 address. If one of them doesn't load your ads, for reasons such as a transient network failure or not having the proprietary Adobe Flash Player installed or even being blind (and thus unable to view images), do you block access to the site for all of them? If so, enjoy your reputation for operating an unreliable server.
Where do you think the money for the connection, server's and bandwidth come from "MARS".
A lot of Slashdot users such as bingoUV would prefer that people operate sites as a hobby, not a business, and pay for connection, server, and bandwidth out of pocket. They prefer the pre-dot-com-boom Internet that was dominated by enthusiasts, not marketers. In bingoUV's opinion, site operators that cannot accept those terms ought to change to a different industry entirely, such as meat butchering.
How about something that is totally client-side and does nothing but obscure ads? Load 'em up, use my bandwidth, whatever. Just hide them so they don't annoy me. Would make the blocker technology impossible to detect.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
YT hasn't released Red in Argentina doesn't mean they don't want to. Do you think they have the resources to simultaneously come to an agreement with all copyright holders at the same time, do all the market research, marketing, and engineering resources? Whining like this just makes you look like an entitled brat.
How much do sites need to pay for the connection, servers and bandwidth? Nowadays you can get 100Mbps uncapped VPS from OVH for 5eur/month and dedicated quadcore server for 9eur/month. Add couple of those running Varnish or something as reverse proxy for your site (and perhaps put free Cloudflare on top of that too) and then get one of their beefier servers as backend, costs 25eur/month. And if you cannot afford to pay that much for a site per month and/or not get enough donations etc, then perhaps you shouldn't be running a website at all.
- Raynet --> .
Whitelist youtube.com and problem solved. Added bonus is you get to support your favourite youtubers when you watch a monetized video. They're not that bad. And they let you skip at 5 seconds anyway if it isn't relevant to you.
OMG facts!
Youtube red is not all about copyright. It's about offline videos, ad-free experience and "youtube original" series and movies. None of which need any sort of copyright and shit.
And, you know, google has thousands of employees. Many of them in my country, since 2006 (http://www.cuitonline.com/detalle/33709585229/google-argentina-s.r.l.html) so yeah, I guess google *CAN* do all of that at the same time.
As for copyright... COME ON! Google is a den of piracy. It's full of TV series and songs that pay, in most cases, NOTHING to the copyright holders. They kinda, sorta take down these vids from time to time. But have you seen how quick google is to delete copyright video, and how quickly they delete porn? Yeah.
It just kinda looks that this is a warning shot. Maybe. Technically, they could refuse service to adblock users. Whether that would be moral... Well thats quite entirely another matter.
The first time I said "Fuck Google" was when they bought and raped Dejanews.com
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It's also not available in Japan. The record companies there generally hate digital due to market dynamics in Japan.
Is there any way I can pay youtube a small amount of money, so I wouldn't have to deal with ads at all, that isn't "Youtube Red"?
"YouTube Red is not currently available in Sweden."
Youtube redoing the ads is the reason I installed ABP again; before that a simple DNS block did the trick.
I don't really mind the ads too much; the ads I hate are the javascript and flash monstrosities that slow browsers down to a crawl. But I'm willing to wait 4-15 seconds for the content to come on; it's what allows content producers to get paid for their (sometimes) hard work (something I eventually want to do for myself one day).
The Penguin Producer
An excellent and cogent post; I would mod you up if I had points.
But to answer this question:
People who really don't understand ethics seem to jump right onto the ad bandwagon, I wonder why that is?
That's because a significant portion of the American populace has turned into corporate apologists, happy to defend the very worst examples of corporate behavior possible.
I'd been getting the "an error has occured, please try again later" error ever since the move to HTML5. I assumed it was yet another bug in HTML5 video support. So, I installed the plugin that lets you force Flash on youtube, and the problem went away. I never connected it with AdBlock. I had no idea an ad was even trying to play. I just forced Flash, which solved the problem, and never looked back. If Goggle wants to get rid of Flash, then they need to fix their HTML5 support to not get broken by adblockers (and also give a more informative error message, as I had no clue that adblocking was the problem).
It is, annoying, however, that the Flash version continues to default to pretty much the smallest low-resolution version available, and I have to switch to 720p or 1080p on *every single video*, despite my having set my preferences to use the highest video resolution. So, you either get broken HTML5 or broken Flash, neither one of which they appear to have any intention of fixing....
YouTube Red isn't being offered in Argentina for the same reason many other services/things aren't being offered in Argentina.
Because it's an absolutely fucked up country that's impossible to do business with/in unless you're an Iranian or Russian politician trying to make extremely dodgy secret deals or try to hire a hitman to make a politician disappear a day before he testifies.
You know how corrupt and problematic (to be gentle) your country is; don't blame it on Google.
You shouldn't blame any company or person for not taking Argentina seriously.
P.S: why don't you use that energy to complain against your own government, for, say, making you ask for an approval to go on vacation and pay 20% tax if you, god forbid, want to use your money outside of Argentina?