YouTube's server-side ads resulted in a black screen for ad blocker users
About a month ago, we reported that YouTube has begun testing server-side ads. Now, users are reporting that they are running into a black screen when they tried to watch videos.
YouTube has been cracking down on ad blockers rather aggressively since last year, in a bid to get users to switch to YouTube Premium, which starts at $13.99 for a month's subscription.
Brief recap on YouTube's war against ad blockers
The streaming service allegedly began delaying the videos, creating an artificial lag on browsers other than Chrome and Edge. But, reports indicated that the problem affected users who had an ad blocker installed.
The Mountain View company had revealed in April this year, that it was displaying an anti-ad block prompt for users who were blocking ads, and encouraged them to subscribe to its Premium subscription. But ad blockers came to the rescue once again, allowing users to bypass the nag screen. Less than a month later, it appeared that Google stepped up its efforts by causing videos to skip automatically if it detected an ad blocker, but it turned out to be a bug related to Adblock Plus. Firefox users have accused YouTube of deliberately offering an inferior experience on non-Chromium browsers, but it has never been proven definitively.
Anyway, Google wasn't done with its shenanigans. YouTube decided to inject server-side ads into the videos, i.e. unlike ads that run separately, these new ads are embedded directly into the video stream, and are tricky to block, but it was not an impossible task for the good-old ad blockers.
Seeing a black screen on YouTube? It's not just you.
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.
I did not run into the issue in Firefox, but that's mostly because I don't use it for YouTube anymore. However, I can confirm that FreeTube had a similar issue at about the same time. Videos were failing to load when using LocalAPI. This bug was quickly fixed in an update, and I think it is possible that the two problems could have been related to each other. And for those of you who are experiencing the auto-scrolling window issue in FreeTube, here's a workaround for the annoying bug.
On a side note, Google Chrome users may notice a warning that says "These extensions may soon no longer be supported". You can learn more about it by reading Martin's article.
Revanced for Android, Freetube for Windows and Firefox with uBO. Occasionally if video doesn’t load, update the filter lists. F**k Google
Don’t use YouTube, there is nothing interesting on it, only paid idio peddling the west’s degenerate woke propaganda. Don’t use Windows, there are hundreds of Linux distributions to choose from, ironically, Freetube is also available for Linux.
@Allwynd Don’t use Brave too.
Thank you @Allwynd. By the way how’s the weather in Saint Petersburg
Just don’t log in.
that’s right!
Next step : BAN IP !!!
this won’t work for mobile internet users, who can change their IP in one move, because their IP changes with each new connection.
Bottom line: Adblockers are not illegal. YouTube has roughly 6 billion videos uploaded by users that don’t have any copyrights to the uploaded material, and Google gets paid for that with ads. How legal is that? If I listen to a Heavy Metal album from 1984 uploaded by MetalGodSlayerPussyKiller_99, Google should not get paid for it in any shape or form.
@Bobo,
err. advertising allows them to host your videos without directly charging you? And people upload in things like 4k now, do you know how big the file sizes can get??
@bruh
err. I would argue that Google has so much money that it could afford to host all videos a billion trillion times over for the next 500 years without showing any ads. What the ads do, is feeds Google even more money and it also makes girls in bikinis pretending to build cabins on the north pole by themselves multimillionaires. There’s a guy showing football shoes to people who owns like 5 supercars by now. He makes a thousand times more money than an ordinary working man. A woman shoving her exploding camel toe in your face calls it yoga and buys a mansion with the revenue from that 1 minute clip alone. She has 400 new camel toe yoga clips every month. There are tens of thousands of camel toe yoga ladies on YouTube. I want no part in funding this madness. This is not about compensation for the upload of a scratchy vinyl rip of a Heavy Metal record from 1984, this is about a behemoth company abusing its monopoly and its endless greed. Let’s destroy YouTube and start all over with a level playing field, morals and common sense. This circus has gone too far.
@Bobo,
“I would argue that Google has so much money that it could afford to host all videos a billion trillion times over for the next 500 years without showing any ads”, that’s not what it’s about, just because someone is rich doesn’t compel them to charity. Just because Johnny’s parents gave him a £10 note doesn’t mean he should give Suzie £2 when the ice-cream truck arrives, it would be nice if he did, but he is not compelled to.
For a long time Youtube was actually operating at a loss and getting helped out by the parent company Alphabet, they held onto youtube just because it’s so “potentially valuable”. The fact of the matter is, “free” video hosting (and with fast loading speeds) is not cheap to run, which is why there is not much competition, and the competition is not as good.
I don’t need to know what kind of things you seek out on the platform, although thanks for telling me, I guess? I don’t use the algorithm, or suggestions, I just have my subscriptions list and for the most part, that’s it.
If people want to watch football shoe reviews, or yoga videos, how is that your problem? “buys a mansion with the revenue from that 1 minute clip alone”, um, how many adverts can you even place in a 1 minute video? Don’t be hyperbolic, it makes you seem uncharitable.
@bruh,
Youtube doesn’t support 4K. I see “4K” all the time depicted on still images of videos, but the yt site reduces them to formats it supports and the maximum for those is 1080p
Apart from that youtube videos play just fine on Invidious using Firefox or one of its forks. Here’s an example: https://invidious.incogniweb.net/watch?v=X4pcIAxyzIE
So the moral of this story is don’t use a Chrome browser. I use Floorp which is a Firefox fork which includes far more privacy features compared to vanilla Firefox. Get it from here: https://floorp.app/en
+1, completely agree with your comment.
It’s bad enough that users are forced to watch ads just to view a video, but the cost of bypassing that at $13,99 a month is outrageous! Does YT think we’re all so stinking rich that we can afford to splash out that kind of money every month just to watch a video without intrusive ads every few minutes.
Then again, I think it’s precisely that kind of money because Google would prefer you to watch ads because that’s where they derive their income from. By calculating some ridiculous amount they assume users will ultimately succumb to watching ads in order to view videos.
Of course the content creators are all in favour of this abhorrent policy because they make money when the number of views exceed a certain figure. Otherwise the simple answer would be to delete all the videos. Without videos youtube ceases to exist. Will that day ever arrive? Don’t hold your breath.
It’s not outrageous for what you get. You also get YouTube Music with it…witch by itself coast $10 a month…so you basically paying $4 a month for YouTube only. I wish google gives a stand alone plan just for YouTube instead of bundling it with Music streaming service.
@Lizard
My two cents: People say YouTube Music is so amazing, there’s music there that the others don’t have. Why is that? Is it because YouTube have made better deals with record companies? Have YouTube contacted every band member from obscure bands that made some weird albums in 1976 that were independently released? Nope. YouTube Music plays you illegally uploaded music. Uploaded by anyone, without copyrights. That’s what you are listening to that’s not available on other streaming platforms. You pay Google and Google takes that money and compensates nobody in these cases. Wonderful business. Imagine being the largest car dealership in the world and a big chunk of the cars you sell are stolen. You didn’t steal them, someone just left them in your showroom. You sell them and keep the money. No one will say a thing, because you are the largest car dealership in the world.
I rarely use YouTube anymore, but when I have to I use Piped and Invidious instances or a 3rd party program/app that has no ads and extra features like downloading videos to mo3 or mp4.
I prefer Rumble and Odysee now. YouTube is a remnant from a bygone era. Google were too greedy with it and it pushes people away. There is censorship on comments and video content, it’s not democracy and free speech at all, but a dictatorship, reflecting western society that is just hypocritical.
If you use it, I personally don’t so Google music adds zero value.
I think that the most you try to block, the worst Youtube works. I have UblockOrigin with the minimum filters by default and I barely can see ads in Youtube. However, when I add more and more filters, the most annoying it gets while seeing videos. So probably imho Google has made some kind of reverse engineering to detect some filters of UblockOrigin to just block the website to work properly. Maybe I am wrong? However it works for me, the less filters, the better the browsing. Thanks for the article by the way! :]
I use multiple vectors to confuse YouTube.
1)Content blockers.
2)Dedicated scripts to skip ads and prevent persistent popups.
3)Login only to leave comment or rate video and log out immediately.
4)Use VPN switching from country to country when first three does not work.
5)Use alternative YouTube apps when first four does not work.
So far it works when they start with “Video can not play in your app” crap.
The thing is, people have been watching YouTube without ads for AGES now. They will NEVER pay Google to keep watching without ads. Never. That would be defeat. That would be submission. That would be humiliation. It’s a war and the gloves are off, Google will not win this. The only way Google CAN win this is if the uBlock Origin developer could be bought, or murdered. I have no doubt Google have considered both options. Even then, his work would be picked up by someone else. People detest ads, Google needs to find another way to display them without them angering everybody. Put a tiny little clickable banner on the bottom of the screen “Hey there fatso, buy your Ozempic here”, don’t touch the video or make people watch ads before watching videos. That’s just rude. Like going to a restaurant: “Before you get your meal, first you must eat a big bowl of shit”.
Well, it looks like the moderator(s) of the Ublock Origin subreddit has been apparently ‘bought off’ by Google. A couple of days ago, he nuked the YouTube anti-ads ‘megathread’! There is now no talk of adverts on there!
I knew something fishy was going on when the popular monthly anti-advertisement pinned thread ‘stuck’ on February, and thus ceased to change each month. He has been extremely zealous in deleting people’s solutions and questions over the past few months or so, especially very recently, where he went into overdrive!
This ties in with Google making it very difficult indeed for adblock users, over the past week or so.
So, they’ve just ‘given up’- the people behind Ublock Origin??
It’s just like 1984- the thread has gone down the memory hole… “it never happened”… people have always loved woke propaganda ‘adverts’ on YouTube! / -:
I wonder how much Google paid them…?
Well, once again Google makes it quite clear that YT is in the very first place meant as a channel for selling and showing intrusive ads, and only secondary as a place for people to post and watch videos. I am pretty sure that with this obnoxious-ads-first priority, in the long run Google will shoot themselves in the foot. Any more moderate advertising policy would have been much more profitable for everyone concerned. Not to mention the fact that they re-triggered an arms race (ever newer adpushing tricks vs. ever newer adblocker tricks) that will of course never end, and can never be won definitily by either side. In the meantime, both advertisers and the public continue to be duped by Google’s shortsighted ad-selling focus.
Ultimately, if server-side ad injection becomes a thing, the last resort would be a VPN set to a country where YouTube has not rolled out ads yet. Albania, for example, or Russia (although there are talks of banning YouTube in Russia, so meh, I guess). The fight against VPNs is a fight against windmills, not least because some VPN providers buy up domestic IP addresses to circumvent bans of their original, known IP address ranges.
Or one could think about leaving YouTube for greener pastures, like e.g. Odysee in case the creators you follow are on there. I would have long left YouTube if only the creators did the same.
SponsorBlock is not viable here as far as I know, because the server-side ads will be injected at random points in the video. Even for videos that SponsorBlock currently works on, it will fail because with server-side ads, the timestamps are all off.
Hey, about talks of banning Youtube in Russia, do you know if that is coming from Russian govt. or from Youtube/Google side?
Thanks.
the russian govt. is throttling YouTube by 70%, no blocking. Because of their “anti-russia policy”
@Pickled
It is a soft ban until the end of September. They are trying to move people to their own platforms “voluntarily” first. Kind of what YouTube does itself by throttling video speed for people who are using Ad Blockers and pushing Premium.
It is a Russian govt. thing. Kremlin naturally wants everybody in Russia to use its own video platforms. When YouTube allowed Russian propaganda channels, they tolerated YouTube, but now that YouTube has blocked them, the war is on. Russian govt. also does not want to update YouTube servers when they can nationalize them and use them for their own video hosting platforms. So this is not as sudden as many people think. I bet they have been preparing for this moment for years.
The principal of freedom of speech is a cornerstone of democracy. Who do you think may have the most problems with YouTube letting almost anyone freely and publicly express their opinions about government?
Freedom of speech is the absence of GOVERNMENTAL censorship (eg not throwing you into jail or beating you up for saying the “wrong” thing in public).
YouTube in contrast (or also ghacks) is not a public space, but a private system, so the owner decides what statements are being tolerated on it (to some degree because they may be sued and thus might be made liable for non-deleted statements by a 3rd party). This right is part of the terms and conditions which you implicitly agree to, when using the system. Seems people really do not understand the difference between freedom of speech and systems that are privately owned.
I’ll give you an example: some radical Muslims (or Neo-nazis or whatever extremist group pleases you, this is just a made-up fantasy example) decide to have a massive demonstration, demanding the mandatory introduction of Sharia law for the entire population as everything else would be heresy and is unbearable and thus unacceptable. And they decide (for whatever absurd reason) that this has to take place in YOUR living room, which is likely not a public space, unless you are homeless.
a) Do you think you have to let them, because “freedom of speech” (and/or “freedom of religion”) ?
b) Would you let them, because “freedom of speech” (and/or freedom of religion) ?
Freedom of speech relates to public places and means freedom from censorship by THE STATE (that’s the one who can legally beat you up or in certain situations even kill you, if it deems you did something wrong or you are just in the way). Freedom of speech is a civil right, that was created to protect you from things like this. It doesn’t relate in any way to privately owned systems or places (primarily because there are ownership rights, there is contract law, and more importantly: eg Google, can’t legally beat you up or kill you, even if it wanted to, at least not in western democracies).
Civil rights protect citizens from being squashed like a fly by the almighty state for illegitimate reasons. They are the reason you can live your life, without having to permanently fear, being killed by a sadistic civil servant or arbitrarily being thrown into jail, just for the LOLS of it.
Civil/constitutional rights are protections, not irrevocable permissions for everyone to violate the rights of other citizens or private organizations as they please.