The number of ads I had popping up while trying to read that article isn't discouraging me from using adblockers.

If you see an ad, close the tab.

Lemme try and feel sorry for my cartoonishly rich tech overlords real quick.........

If 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.

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’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.

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.

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.

Google know who they're streaming videos to. They know this from the back-end. They absolutely do not require a script running in the browser to phone home about it in order to count "views". All the telemetry they need they can get from existing traffic; the additional telemetry supplied by scripts is mostly just for Bad Reasons and it's morally fine to block it.

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.

Didn't age verification - also recently implemented - cause youtube views to drop?

Here's a case of it very well explained.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDPUzfwa4u0

caused youtube views count to drop

oh no... anyway

(shrug) don't care if it affects views, never should have had them in videos regardless.

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.

*Goolag shooting itself on foot be like.

The dev community is just adapting to shit thrown.

I don't use ad blockers, just normal YouTube. One thing I noticed about a month ago is that when I'm watching some silly video a 55 second ad will come on with about three minutes left to view on the video. It's at that point I usually just back out and look for other videos to watch. My grandson told me it seems odd because YouTube monetization requires the whole video to be viewed before they'll pay. Does this make sense? I don't know much about "monetization" I just watch silly videos.