My YouTube channel is 100% viewer funded and I’m so so proud of it. It’s EXTREMELY difficult to stay afloat this way and I think I’m literally the only channel in my space that can truthfully make that claim. It’s hard but god damn it is so sweet.
If it’s a popup or interrupts me in any way I will go out of my way to never use or buy whatever it is. I wish more people would do the same.
I will do anything in my power to protect my children from online ads. At home it’s very simple with your basic adblockers and Pihole.
In the 5th grade my daughter got a laptop from school, it was a quite decent Thinkpad. She brought it home to do some presentation and went to her room. After few minutes she brought the laptop to me and said: “Dad, I think there’s a virus or something like that in my computer.”
The only web browser installed was Edge, without any kind of ad blockers. My kid had assumed that the hideous intrusive ads were some form of malware attack. I installed Firefox on her laptop with all the proper tweaks and disabled Edge as best as I could. All the Windows ad and telemetry options were also on, I disabled everything that was possible. I also showed how different themes can be installed, we ended up with a classic Nyan Cat ;)
When she took the laptop back to school I told her that Edge is not to be used. Firefox can handle everything and if the teacher has some issue with this, I am happy to come and explain this in person.
Now my daughter’s laptop is apparently the only ad free machine in her class and the other kids have openly expressed their envy. Why the school IT-department had not installed adblockers and had left the Windows telemetry on is simply baffling. No one should have to watch ads, but kids in school should be especially protected from this crap.
My kid had assumed that the hideous intrusive ads were some form of malware attack.
She was spot on.
My nephew was getting worked up by constant ad interruptions in his iPad games (I know, I know) so I installed PiHole on their network to block ads. A week later my brother demanded I take it out becaus he wants ads back. I’m not joking - he actually clicks the sponsored links in search results, and it annoyed him that he couldn’t click on adverts in articles and on Facebook any more. Some people really are further gone than you might realise.
I can kind of relate to that last part, with my SO complaining about not being able to click the first few links on google results - and my inner self is screaming ‘why google in the first place?!’ 😄
On a sidenote, its so crazy to see what all the “free” mobile games are phoning home once you check the Pihole statistics.
People grossly underestimate how vulnerable their brains are. They think they are in control.
They think that simply watching the commercial will only increase the amount of information they have, and that it will therefore, given that they are fully rational and fully in control, only improve their ability to choose what is best for them.
Meanwhile millions of people are led to fascism and world war because of the targeted videos they see on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
I’m autistic, and since I feel pain when My attention is exhausted, I think trying to take someone’s attention against their will is violence.
And no, I’m not going to pay you for the privilege to not listen to your yapping.
I’m divided on this. I happily pay streaming services for ad-free plans but I’ve never been so into YouTube that I’ve wanted to pay for it. I have it blocked outright anyway (part of my “fuck Google” blocklist collection).
Sponsorblock, ublock origin on Firefox. You’ll never see an ad again on YouTube.
There is a wealth of actual information on YouTube, it’s a decent tool once you weed past the bullshit. I wouldn’t just outright block it.
I used a VPN to turkey for 3 years to pay for premium, was $4/month for family plan. The prices are outrageous, ublock origin fixes that bullshit. My money goes to helping block more advertisers now.
The only ads I can’t automatically block are the posters in the street. Luckily there are good regulations in place about that where I live, so it’s not all that bad. But I am pretty upset when I have to stare at a 5x3 meters large AI generated slop-ad during my train commute. What are they thinking? This all looks uncanny as hell.
This is why I have concerns about AR cybernetic eye replacement technology in science fiction (and maybe in real life sometime). You’d install adblockers for real life… and then get some virus that makes the adblocker hide the bus as you’re about to cross the street.
If you’re still skipping, take the next step and start blocking.
Is there a good guide a Revanced newbie could follow to get it all set up? I’ve been searching around uBlock as a lot of sites related to Revanced flagged as “bad ware.” Theres a lot of info out there but some of it’s quite old (might not be an issue) but my ignorance and anxiety prompted by the uBlock flags makes me hesitant to trust what comes up in searches. Most of the communities here are quiet as well.
Any guidance would be appreciated!
If you don’t want to self-host https://joindns4.eu/ has a public ad-blocking dns service
Also, for ad-blocking on your phone on the go, pair your Pi-Hole with a Wireguard VPN where you connect your phone to the VPN to pass your phone traffic through your Pi-Hole DNS. I have this set up for my phone, and it’s tits.
Fantastic advice. I’d be lost without the ability to VPN back to my home for DNS blocking. Plus the ability to safely connect to everything on my LAN without exposing ports (NAS, Home Assistant, cameras, etc). Thanks for mentioning this!
Pihole is 100% awesome but I just want mention that AdGuard is great on iOS devices to deal with ads while away from home. There is also AdGuard Home which is compareable to Pihole and is also free software (GPL 3).
Indubidubly, and a cherry on top. Not only is Pi-hole an Adblocking DNS server, it’s also a DNS server and solves any issue with name resolution at the door for your services.
dns certs? Pihole’s got you.
I use Rethink for my phone and it’s pretty good. I don’t have a VPN yet so it works for now.
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Also you can get sponsor block for youtube and it auto skips sponsored segments.
It’s hilarious to me that Youtube, through their low payout for advertising, has pushed everyone into doing paid sponsor segments. Which means that paying for Youtube Premium doesn’t work, you need Sponsorblock if you want to not see ads on Youtube. And if you’re installing Sponsorblock, why not just get uBlock Origin too?
I wouldn’t mind youtube ads so much if they weren’t so fucking bad. Like the lowest of the low most shitty ads are on youtube. Also they allow stuff in the ads that creators making videos aren’t allowed to (sexualized content, scams etc.)
I saw one that ran for a while recently talking about a device that measures blood sugar (for diabetics) by just clamping it on your finger, no blood draw or prick. The video of it literally showed a pulse oximeter. No blood sugar readout, even in the ad video, just pulse and oxygen level.
I think if they were more effective at manipulating people, I’d hate them more.
Also, at some point people lost the skill of making short ads on YouTube (or YouTube reduced the price of unskippable ads too much). If your brand or product is so bad you need more than five seconds of advertisement before a YouTube video, you either need to improve your product (so it’s easier to describe) or hire a better copywriter.
Most actual good ads on YouTube have been 5-10 seconds, interesting, informative – and they fulfill the actual part of what the ad is trying to achieve. They get you interested, and get you to click it to find out more. They have a clear message that you can internalize even before realising there’s an ad running.
It’s almost as if advertisers are purposely making bad ads to force people to watch through them without interaction to avoid paying the premium for the user click rate. That or they simply don’t understand the amount of value a good ad director and a good copywriter can generate.
Vast majority are made with AI now so they’re an extra layer of shitty.
That certainly contributes as well. I find myself especially annoyed by AI-created soundtracks – they usually sound like a mix of someone passing out in a drumset while someone else is hammering random keys on a keyboard. Similar to the early deep dream AI pictures, but for music.
Mullvad has built in ad-blocking as well. Haven’t needed my pi-hole in over a year.
Remember kids: despite what the ad industry may claim, they’re running arbitrary code on your devices, so it’s your moral duty to not so politely tell them to fuck off
I believe that ads are just yet another tragedy of the commons type of thing, where bad actors not only ruin it for everyone, but also convert good actors to being bad actors.
I’d say there’s three tiers:
- Ads showing you things you actually want or need, and providing you with new information.
- These are going to have high CPMs, so you don’t need many per page, and having more per page will decrease their value, but kind of require tracking to ensure their relevance.
- Ads showing you things you might not want or need, but might cobsider buying, or information that isn’t immediately relevant.
- This is the baseline for reasonable quality, untargeted ads, and CPMs for these are going to be fairly low, but much higher if you click on them
- Ads promoting scams, malware, and things you neither want nor need.
- In this case, the CPMs will be virtually zero, so the site is forced to cram as many on the page as they can. They’re also encouraged to get you to click by mistake.
- This makes people block ads or trackers, reducing the number of ads in the first category and forcing more sites to adopt these patterns.
It’s kind of sad that it’s going this way (and has been for a while) but I guess it’s going to end up with just a return to paying for media with money rather than ads.
I see all ads as scams in my eyes, and most major companies are the scammers.
ads from (name a company)…you’re being scammed… products are cheaply made, fail, low quality and riddled with lies/fake words and misleading text.
There hasn’t been an insignificant number of times I’ve found out about a new product or event I’m interested in, a sale for something I already want, or something like that through advertising.
It’s rare as a proportion, but it definitely does happen.
The more ads you show people, the less each ad is worth. Because people have a fixed amount of money and only so much time and attention, so each ad is competing with all the other ads they’re being shown. People are skipping your ad because all the previous ads have them sitting with a finger already on the skip button.
If people spend more time watching ads, they don’t have any more money than they did before, so each ad has a smaller chance of leading to a sale. We’re racing towards a world where there’s flashing, moving ads on every surface around you and you don’t buy any of it or even see the advertising, it’s just visual noise to ignore. And advertisers will inevitably respond by looking for more things to put more intrusive ads on.
And none of the advertisers want to be the first one to advertise less, they’re all fighting for advertising market share, trying their hardest to get a larger cut of the profits and making things worse for everyone including themselves in the process.
- Ads showing you things you actually want or need, and providing you with new information.
Ads are one of the biggest vectors for malware. Even if the main reason you’re blocking them is just because they’re annoying, it’s one of the best things you can do for online safety. Also, the reason tech companies are collecting every single piece of data they can about you is to serve you more targeted ads - if every ad was blocked, data brokers would have no reason to exist.
If you’re running an OPNSense or PFSense router, put Adguard on it. If you’ve got a Raspberry Pi lying around, install Pihole on it. Stop using Chrome and install UBlock Origin on your new browser. Do your small part to make the internet a safer place, and get shown less advertising to boot.
Also, the reason tech companies are collecting every single piece of data they can about you is to serve you more targeted ads.
That’s half the reason. The other half is to manipulate elections
True.
Be like Elvis and shoot your TV.
Drink verification can
For in-video sponsors, I remapped my mouse side buttons to the left and right arrow keys - that way I can easily skip forward/backward in 5-sec intervals. I highly recommend it.
