I think when they were trying to push the YouTube Red streaming shows there were a few times where they put in full episodes of shows as pre-roll ads. They were skippable but an hour long TV show as a pre-roll is just obnoxious.

I'm in the same camp. I was generally fine when it was an occasional skippable pre-roll ad before some videos. But the last time I watched a video without a blocker, there were two unskippable ads at the start plus two more each at the 7 and 14 minute mark of a 20 minute video.

This hour has 22 minutes indeed.

Same. If it wasn't for my adblockers, I'd have stopped using youtube long ago.

Holy crap. I had no idea YouTube was that bad. I guess my ad blockers work better than I thought.

It's going to be a never-ending cat-and-mouse game from here, I guess. And then eventually Google will make Chrome required with their trusted platform bs.

Can confirm, this advice came direct from the developers of UBO and it does work.

And what will they have lost?

I mean, I get your point, but why would they care

And where will you go?

I wouldn't be surprised if they are using the information recorded from people who click the close button to better train their algorithm for detecting adblockers.

That really depends on what their goal is.

From a business perspective it's not worth fighting to eliminate 100% of ad block uses. The investment is too high. But if they can eliminate 50% or 70% or 90% of ad block uses with youtube? That could be worth the effort for them. If they can "win" for Chrome and make it a bit annoying for Firefox that would likely be enough for Google to declare it a huge success.

People willing to really dig all the way in to get a solution they desire are not the norm. Google can be OK with the 1% of us out there as long as we aren't also making it possible for another huge chunk of people to piggyback off it effortlessly.

It's a fairly straightforward cat and mouse game. The only thing that has the potential to make it complicated soon is Google's Web Environment Integrity API.

An updated uBlock Origin will remove the popup

If you only use uBlock default blocking lists then it won't come up. If you use any other list, like Easylist or Adguard then it comes up immediately

No one can create an alternative platform. Youtube costs far far, far too much to run. This is why everyone failed. Google subsidised it for what, 15 years? Before it got any level of profitability and even then, nof really. Google derives other value from it, like feeding data into their ad profiles, but no one else needs that.

It's also clear that workarounds will stop soon as Google has installed Web drm directly into chrome

You will. I didn’t start getting it until three days ago.