Tldr: youtube forced ai into video monitoring and it keeps killing videos it shouldn’t, so instead of saying Ai is bad they’re blaming af blockers because why not lie when there’s no repercussions?
YouTube views are dropping because they are using AI to vet and cull age innappropriate content from minors. the problem is the ai is very bad at its job and marks way too many videos as not advertiser friendly, which effectively kills YouTube promoting that video in feeds. this is the default view for new accounts, so you have to specifically turn off parental controls to see a normal feed. this started happening about 4 months ago. a number of channels I watch have made comments about this, including Redlettermedia
I don’t understand:
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What is ‘AI in video monitoring?’
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The article mentions literally nothing about this, so where did that come from?
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Not saying I don’t believe that’s what’s happening, but the article mentions nothing about any sort of YouTube AI interference.
Something that I’ve been confused about ever since people have been talking about this, is that there didn’t seem to be a change of views from mobile devices. Like, I know that adblockers are less common on mobile devices because most people either don’t know they are available or aren’t using browsers that have/support (good) adblockers. But, was there really no noticeable change at all?
Blocking ads for decades everywhere, life is sooo goood without that cancer.
P.S. The only place were ads should appear are “yellow pages” thing, for example messenger channels just for that, where you intentionally join to look for local deals, discounts, contractors etc, especially to support local economy and not some megacorp. And ofc current google spying is not helping, block the ads, block trackers, it ruins the “steal the data” model.
frustrated by ads that feel irrelevant
What?
Do they think we have a friend-or-foe system that only shoots down advertisements from adversaries?
An ad is an ad, and should be terminated on sight.
I’m sure that the number of times I’ve decided “nah I don’t need to see that” after being told an ad blocker violated YouTube’s terms of service has absolutely nothing to do with it either.
Even on a computer without ad blocker (work laptop, chrome browser)
the number of times i say “nah i don’t need to see that” as soon as thes annoying ads comes up before the video…
The decline probably has very little to do with ad blockers.
Didn’t age verification - also recently implemented - cause youtube views to drop?
Here’s a case of it very well explained.
It was the first thing most people assumed was the culprit, as it silently enabled Restricted Mode, but since the biggest difference came from Computer views, despite the age verification happening on all platforms, that is strong evidence against that having any impact
It’s gotten to the point where I have to re-load each YT tab three times before the video ever starts playing - only because I use uBlock.
Still better than watching ads, but it is getting annoying.
I switched from Chrome to MS Edge and don’t have that YouTube ad-blocking issue with uBlock anymore. Other than that, MS Edge works exactly like Chrome.
For me, it works without reloading… After a 15 second load and an insufferably laggy UI despite having no identifiable system bottleneck.
Yeah yt is basically unusable on Firefox with a blocker and it’s 100% by design. Yt even gives a helpful pop-up offering to tell me why it’s running so slow.
It is like they know you’re using adblocks, so instead of trying to force ads down your throat, they try making your experience miserable by breaking their own viewer or whatever. It is absolutely petty of them.
Leave a video sitting there in idle for too long, come back, it plays for 10 seconds then has to reload itself. Sometimes, it doesn’t do this, so it requires a complete refresh.
They can do this bullshit all they want but I am not letting up on blocking ads.
I have a theory that YT deliberately makes you wait the length an ad would have been if you have uBlock Origin installed. Ive just let it “buffer” for 30 seconds or so and it will eventually load the video.
I am fine if it means I don’t have to watch some scam ass ad.
I’d rather watch nothing than an ad trying to sell me something.
I have no problems with ublock on Firefox or Librewolf, unless I try to skip past what the video already loaded, then it’s a dice roll whether it’ll work or not
Still better tbh
I have the same problem, and after you start clicking play, often you can wait it out and the video will eventually play on its own after 10-15 seconds
This mostly happens when you use youtube while being logged into a google account.
I fixed this by using firefox containers + https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/switch-container/- logout from google / clear cookies.
- switch to a new “google” container and login to see your subscrpitions
- if a video doesn’t load switch to decontained
also has the nice benefit of not messing up your reccomendations when clicking on random yt-links from other sites
This does not work on phone OSes
I use Grayjay on Android, and it tends to do a good job. I can have subscriptions w/o being logged in to my YT account, and videos load after 5 secs or so every time.
Thank you. You are the best
caused youtube views count to drop
oh no… anyway
If you see an ad, close the tab.
Literally the only way they will learn. I really don’t understand how we as a society have accepted ads as a necessary evil. We all hate them, but we all also make them work. It’s horrible.
It’s going to take a big cultural shift to get enough people to pay content creators through subscriptions to compete with ad-driven models.
Eventually YouTube’s hubris will cross the line where enough people will just assume the ads are so bad it’s not worth trying to watch a video. As somebody with technical means and no tolerance for ads I’m astonished more people aren’t there yet.
How much do we need to pay though? Most content creators I see have their patreon around $7 CDN/mo. Add even a couple and you’re now at the cost of a streaming subscription with much more content. I would have no problem paying content creators if the fees were more reasonable, but right now I only subscribe to a couple.
Should a creator’s patreon drop in price to $1 or $2 a month, or should the viewer pay a small fee per view? What new monetization system would make sense where the consumer doesn’t have an unaffordable pile of subscriptions, but the creators still get paid a fair rate for their effort?
Nebula seems pretty cool, it’s basically a bunch of YouTubers mirroring their youtube content and making original videos for a paid streaming service with no ads. That’s one way of doing it
I’ve been wondering for a while where the point of diminishing returns is. Surely, at some point, ads become aggressive enough to have an adverse effect on advertisers?
I often wonder how ads of any kind have ever worked, unless it was an ad for something we had already planned on buying.
Ads are super effective. If you have something to buy, but you don’t know much about it, you will tend towards buying the thing that was advertised to you more often than not just because you are more familiar with it over other things. You might not stick with it, but being the first thing someone tries is huge.
I don’t know why my brain said this was memeable, but here we are
Repetition brings familiarity and familiarity leads to trust for the vast majority of humans. It is the reason that campaign signs works, why brand names are so valuable, and why popularity tends to increase exponentially when it works.
Most ads are just intended to get you to remember the thing they are selling.
Well, this abstract says it’s about 20% effective over not advertising but this is a meta analysis and isn’t focused exclusively on internet ads.
The baked in biases being that the authors are “a German chaired professor of marketing at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany” and his research assistant.
i know what im about to do is beyond the pale on lemmy but here it is anyway. for youtube, they have to spend money to host the content and deliver it. you can pay a subscription fee to enable them to do that. they have ads on there for people who expect free shit forever
Are these “we all” people you talking about are in the same room with us right now? I don’t really think that would apply to all of us.
All these sites monitor engagement, they walk the line between maximum ads and users. If we decrease the users, they’ll decrease the ads to try and keep us.
They’ll just insert bots who’ll comment generic, soulless things to say instead. “OMG This product amazed me!” or “I cannot BELIEVE how nobody discovered this sooner!” all the while artificially inflating numbers.
LOL, nah. If we decrease the users, they’ll increase the ads to try to compensate for declining revenue. They believe they have all the power and don’t give a fuck what we think.
Classic business death spiral. Same thing is happening in electricity providers everywhere. Prices too high, more people go to solar, reduces their demand (revenues), so they increase their prices to compensate… higher prices means more people choose solar, and around it goes.
For reference, here are the exceptions I’ve been using to try to make sure my viewership counts. Not sure if they’re all needed and they’re probably overkill, but:
@@||youtube.com/api$domain=youtube.com|google.com @@||youtube.com/youtubei$domain=youtube.com|google.com @@||youtube.com/ptracking$domain=youtube.com|google.com @@||play.google.com/log$domain=youtube.com|google.com ! these are meant for checking for active internet connection (https://www.techtapto.com/what-is-gstatic-why-you-see-it-often/#Is_Gstatic_com_generate_204_a_virus) @@||youtube.com/generate_204$domain=youtube.com|google.com @@||google.com/generate_204$domain=youtube.com|google.com @@||youtube.com/gen_204$domain=youtube.com|google.com @@||google.com/gen_204$domain=youtube.com|google.comIf the Google war on ad blocking meant the ad blockers accidently blocked something everyone wants its still Google fault.
Everything was fine until Google decided to change how everything works over and over again to get people to watch the awful ads they let on their platform.
Googlees don’t “let” ads on their platform. Ads are the entire reason for the existence of their platform.
They could hire some people to vet the ads.
A company taking responsibility for the ads they serve? That sounds like communism to me!
YouTube is completely broken on my Apple TV — the last platform I have which actually does display ads. When the app loads, I get a black screen. When I tap on a video (click on it? on the remote?) it goes black, stutters through an ad, stutters through the next one, then stutters through the video for a couple seconds. Sometimes I have to start the video over. If I were running an ad blocker, I would expect static like this… but I’m not. I don’t have a PiHole. The Apple TV has direct, unfiltered access to my WiFi. The ads are showing, but the app is just… broken. On my computers (Macs) I get a perfect experience, because I use Firefox with uBlock Origin like a sane person who knows what they’re doing.
The black screen on the TV could be related to your TV’s HDR settings. Only recent TVs have started to decrease that temporary stutter between SDR/HDR.
It was annoying as hell in ad rolls before I started to pay for YT lite so my kid wouldn’t be advertised to.
No longer paying since they shuttered the YT Kids app on TvOS.
Lemme try and feel sorry for my cartoonishly rich tech overlords real quick…
also it seems too convenient for them for this to happen just after they removed ad blockers from chrome…
For those curious what “adblockers said really happened”:
[AdGuard] suggested that the issue may have been linked to popular community-maintained filter lists like EasyList and uBlock’s Quick Fixes.
A new filter rule added to EasyList on August 11, 2025 targeted telemetry requests thought to be tied to YouTube’s view attribution and analytics.
That rule remained in place until September 10, when it was temporarily disabled.
A similar change was added to uBlock’s Quick Fixes on September 10 and removed on September 17.
OK. I mean Fuck Alphabet anyhow, but this means a youtuber who relies on view counts for monetary income (I guess) would actually have reason to worry about adblockers?
Again, I’m not saying I’m against adblockers or even this particular feature. And I very well see what Google is doing here, trying to get their creators up in arms against adblocking. I just want to know if this is debunkable or if youtubers would have a genuine argument here.
I did not really understand above explanation. I guess I need it ELI5.
I kept up with the drama until about a week ago so what I’m saying here is the status from back then. Someone please add any new context if I’m missing any new developments:
From what it appeared, view counts dropped but ad revenue stayed the same. Even before this whole thing, YouTube pays out for ads watched (and clicked). Pay out was not dependent on raw view count for a long time, if ever.
This suspicious behavior of view count dropping but ad revenue staying the same is actually what tipped people off that the issue was adblock related. The fact that channels with a larger focus on a younger audience seeing less of a drop also helped.
Now those view counts dropping could still have an indirect, negative effect on ad revenue, if it, e.g. automatically leads to YouTube recommending their videos less prominently.
Reported view counts are also important for sponsorships as sponsored video payouts are often tied to hitting specific view counts, and even getting sponsorships and their rates are also typically conditional on view counts. So yes, even though it doesn’t directly impact ad revenue it still directly impacts total channel revenue for anyone that accepts sponsorships.
All that said, Google caused this entire mess by bundling their view counting in with their telemetry. If they just reported the raw download stats for the streams instead of trying to determine every last detail of who is watching the video (for all that juicy advertising data) this problem wouldn’t have happened in the first place.
Basically Youtube instead of counting views via actual requests for the videos instead uses a separate call that essentially says “hey, someone watched this video”. All the ad blockers rather than use a hard coded list of URLs to block which would quickly go stale instead use one of a couple different 3rd party lists the most popular of which is EasyList. EasyList decided to block the URL that youtube uses to register views on the principal that it was a privacy violation because it not only registers “hey someone watched this” but also captures exactly who watched it which allows Google to track your viewing habits.
It wouldn’t matter whether it was intentional or not. Put simply, Google can continue indirectly punishing creators for tolerating adblockers then redirect blame, even though they could have easily separated the metrics from the advertising and telemetry endpoints that blockers filtered. This way they get their money either from unblocked ads or from creator’s reduced view counts, win-win for Google.
As an added bonus for Google, by ensuring view metrics get fucked up, it double punishes creators featuring sponsored content that rely on those metrics to determine how much the sponsor should pay them. Meanwhile Google could, in theory, sell ad placements attached to their own internal metrics that differ from the affected ones publicly visible.
So you’re saying Google packaged the viewcount that’s relevant to monetization into a 3rd party js data request instead of just counting the actual video’s views, and so manages to play content creators against privacy-conscious users?
Worthy of a Roman Emperor, that.
See that’s the fun part. Google is the ad company so it’s all 1st party data. Google can package the Trojan horse however they please, which why it’s such a fine line for the blockers to walk.
I have a few YouTubers I like to support with views of all of their content. Because I want them to get the support, I watch their content on YouTube with no ad blockers.
Louis Rossmann says if you donate 1 dollar direct to the YouTuber you give them more support than a couple of years of watching ads. Keep using a adblocker and buy some merch for support.
I have bought merch, but not everyone has merch for sale. Also I don’t have much extra cash, and they definitely get money from views too, it’s why I advocate other people giving them views also. Also, one of the biggest income drivers for them are sponsorships, and you have to have high view counts to attract sponsors.
