YouTube's server-side ads resulted in a black screen for ad blocker users - gHacks Tech News
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Ad blocker users say that they are seeing a black screen when trying to play a video on YouTube. Here's what happened.

Mashable reports that users ran into a black screen on YouTube, and that it stayed for about 6 seconds before the video began playing. The reports indicate it affected several browsers including Firefox, Edge, Vivaldi.

Some users joked that they would rather see a black screen than an ad. While that’s certainly a better experience, it does waste precious seconds of our time. A simple workaround for the black screen on YouTube is to just refresh the page, hit F5 as soon as the page starts loading. uBlock Origin’s filters were updated with a patch to resolve the problem, the add-on updates its filters automatically. If you are still experiencing the black screen issue, just open the extension’s dashboard and manually update the filters. This tug-of-war is getting annoying, but it appears to me that Google’s efforts are actively promoting the use of ad blockers, instead of attracting new subscribers.

  • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 个月前

    When I stream YouTube to my TV, I get 15-30 seconds of unskippable ads with the ability to skip enabling at the 15 or 30 second mark. The full length of the ad is 90+ seconds (according to the timer that never goes down). Would this implementation work similarly? 6 seconds of a silent black screen is fine; 90 or more seconds because the skip button is also missing would be more annoying (or be a nice time for a bathroom break).

  • Bezier@suppo.fiEnglish
    0·
    2 个月前

    If I hqve to watch a black screen, so be it. Better a moment of peace than an ad.

    Some users joked that they would rather see a black screen than an ad.

    This wasn’t a joke.

    • casmael@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      Wait so there was a brief black screen, then the video? That sounds like the ad blocker is doing a great job…

    • ayyy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      It’s honestly really weird that the journalist ever thought that would be a joke. Like how is it funny? Unless the whole thing is written by a bot that doesn’t understand emotions…

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 个月前

    I thought the whole point of server side ads was that they are embedded in the video, not blockable?

    • tabular@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      Presumably the implementation is not as seamless as that, and 3rd party clients do not handle it like 1st party ones.

    • FiveMacs@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      Just because a company makes lots of money, doesn’t mean they know wtf they are doing or are smart.

      • Xeroxchasechase@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        Sure they know! Every level of middle managers knows exactly what the status of the graphs of goals and progress of their team!

  • wabafee@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 个月前

    Hot take for those who hate YouTube ads while still keep using it. You deserve it. The answer is right in front of us, stop using it there are alternative out there.

  • Teknikal@eviltoast.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 个月前

    I think this is going to continue to the point we have AI adblockers that edit the files free of ads for us in real-time. Then hopefully the technology jumps to Televisions etc.

    Google’s really helping it along in that direction.

    • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      Before Sponsorblock I had an idea of abusing YT’s auto-generated subtitles to auto-skip ads in a very rough manner

  • cybermass@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    2 个月前

    How are they supposed to attract new customers when they are already a monopoly?

    • gari_9812@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      From the beginning of the article:

      …in a bid to get users to switch to YouTube Premium

      Which is still ludicrous of them, considering how much you pay for how little it offers

      • Hylactor@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        Which I’ve been saying into the void for a while. Ideally in capitalism demand drives supply. If their demand is lack luster (for people upgrading to premium), rather than trying to cajole people through force into buying their product, they should drop the fucking price. Instead, they want to keep it bundled with music, and thus make it prohibitively expensive, while simultaneously competing in two seperate markets simultaneously. Give the people a video only tier, at a truly reasonable price, and begin (read: continue) to rake in cash. It’s very frustrating.

      • general_kitten@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        Yep on desktop it offers basically nothing if you have an adblock and on mobile you can get everything you want by patching

    • solsangraal@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      it’s nuts that no one likes ads yet advertising wouldn’t be a billions of dollars industry if they didn’t work

      • eronth@lemmy.world
        English
        0·
        2 个月前

        I legit strongly suspect they don’t work, at least not as well as it’s implied. Like, everyone thinks they work because they used to work really well or something.

      • Crismus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        The problem started when they went from a basic preroll ad, to unskippable and then the large amount of mid-roll ads to push people into buying premium just as they increased the price.

      • Sibbo@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        No one likes being manipulated. I like ads that promote healthy living for example, if they don’t secretly promote any brand or product. They are pretty rare though, almost only in some public health care facilities.

      • Fermion@feddit.nlEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        My wife worked for a company that was heavily reliant on generating leads from ads. They had lots of real time monitoring of conversion rates to make sure they were actually making more money than they were spending on the ads. They would have to turn ad channels off all the time because the return on ad spend went negative.

        So my conclusion is that ads can be somewhat effective for companies, but if they don’t actively monitor and control the performance of their ads, they’re probably just burning money. A lot of companies seem to advertise because they think that’s the only way to grow.

      • warm@kbin.earth
        0·
        2 个月前

        People accepted unobtrusive ads, it’s once they started taking over the actual content that they became a big no-no. The ad companies and ad-reliant websites fucked themselves.

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        Or they work somewhat, resp. in some cases and the rest is make believe in execeutives, a waste of money. Let’s say 50/50?

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.netEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        I’ve seen a few ads recently that are just random as hell, don’t say a product name and don’t even have a website or link to find out what it is even advertising. They always make me wonder how they’re working, if they’re working. They seem like just a waste of money and time for everyone involved, including the advertiser themselves.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          2 个月前

          I use adblockers but my parents don’t. Visiting my folks and seeing the ads they get served is just bizarre. They get served ads in Spanish even though there’s nothing about the account, device or geolocation that would indicate the audience is Spanish speaking, they get very long ads for medicines, which…you know how they always list an increasingly long and concerning bunch of side effects? Well the last one I saw ended with a full reading of the drug’s MSDS. They get ads from car dealers half a continent away, campaign ads for a different state’s legislature…Why was there ever a television advertisement even made for General Electric power plant turbines? Who’s watching Zeltik, gets a mid-roll ad for gigawatt generator components and makes any kind of decision based on what they saw?

          • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.netEnglish
            0·
            2 个月前

            I also get ads in Spanish often when watching on my TV (no adblocker)… Dunno if that’s just because I am in California or if my phone or other devices picked up my Spanish speaking neighbors and assumes I also speak Spanish. I mean, I do, but not well or often.

            • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              0·
              2 个月前

              This is on a Smart TV specifically. I haven’t seen this behavior on a PC or phone…again because it’s my parents’ house, they watch videos on their smart TV. So I don’t know if it makes system language available the way a web browser does…? I will say Spanish is the second-best guess in this area.

        • snooggums@midwest.socialEnglish
          0·
          2 个月前

          The people that do spend the time trying to find out what it is for will remember the eNgAgEmEnT from needing to find out what it is and that correlates with future sales. Just like “rewards” programs that are designed to mentally lock someone into the store/product while harvesting their data.

      • Grimy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        A lot of people don’t mind ads, they even say they don’t see them anymore, that their brain just tunes them out. Then you look at their spending habits and it’s quite clear they are seeing them.

        A big part of the population doesn’t mind being constantly manipulated.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 个月前

          What I’ve found is that advertising only works if I already wanted that product. That advertisement doesn’t have to be these huge ad campaigns that they currently do. It could be as simple as showing a still image of a twix bar, and saying “Hey! Go buy a twix!” Yeah, ok.

          But if I wasn’t already planning on buying that product? Well that ad time may as well have been some archival footage showing the inside of a 1940s concentration camp in use.

          That is to say, both are things that you find offensive to have to be watching, and neither are going to entice you to buy the product.

          munches on a twix bar

          …what?

          • un_owen@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            2 个月前

            The main purpose of ads isn’t to sell you a specific product immediately, their real purpose is to expose you to their brand to make the brand more familiar (and therefore more trustworthy) to you.

            For example, recently, I needed a new insurance. So of course I went to the websites of the 5 insurance companies that I knew from advertising and compared their offers. Then I went to a comparison portal, which again I knew from the ads. The best offer was from a brand I didn’t know so I went with the second one which was from a well known brand. I trusted the second offer more, simply because the brand felt more familiar to me.

            Here’s another story: there is this big online clothing store. I always hated their ads, they were really annoying, and at that time I didn’t understand why anyone would buy clothes online. So guess where I went, 5 years later, after a disappointing offline shopping tour, in desparate need for new clothes?

        • HelixDab2@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          2 个月前

          Beat me to this.

          Advertisers tend to be strongly opposed to measuring advertising effectiveness, because if they’re not effective, then they’re out of a job.

        • solsangraal@lemmy.zipEnglish
          0·
          2 个月前

          i think human psychology is too nebulous and qualitative with way too many factors to definitively “measure” how effective ads are. all they really know is (most of the time) buy ads, revenue goes up.

          but there’s a reason your personal data is so coveted by advertisers. if they can parse that you’re an avid hiker from the millions of data points they collect from you (websites visited, geolocation data, other purchases, etc), then they can sell ads for $400 hiking boots specifically for you, that people who never leave their couch and order delivery from hungry howies every day would just ignore

          • Ilovethebomb@lemm.eeEnglish
            0·
            2 个月前

            I suspect that’s why Facebook makes so much money, they have a lot of information on you like that.

            In a weird way, this is actually quite handy, as you get ads for things that are actually relevant to you.

            • solsangraal@lemmy.zipEnglish
              0·
              2 个月前

              dude, ads are bullshit. you should never buy anything based on the seller’s ads. and i used to say a good way to research products was go to the niche subreddit, or even amazon reviews, but those are so full of bullshit shills anymore it’s hard to know.

    • Kalysta@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      6 seconds of black screen VS 11 mins of the epoch times telling me how trans people are the devil?

      I’ll take the black screen.

    • Einar@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      I get a feeling their time will be up soon. I hope I’m wrong.

      • Ace! _SL/S@ani.socialEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        This is the same cat and mouse game hackers have been doing with game-/anticheat developers since multiplayer games became a thing

        Are people still cheating? Yes

        So unless google manages to pull of their device certification fuckery for PCs it will never work out in their favor

    • circuscritic@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      Piped apps have been broken at least 6 - 8 times in the past couple of weeks.

      It’s the biggest Google effort I’ve seen to crack down on 3rd party YT clients.

      I actually used to pay for YT premium, then they removed my discount AND raised the price to over $12/mo.

      Sometimes I do miss my algorithm feed, just not enough to watch YT ads, or pay $12 - 15/mo.