Are views also decreasing on channels without ads enabled? Is it possible that some endpoint that needs to be hit to register a view is being blocked by privacy-related (not ad-related) lists that adblockers use?
If the answer to both is no, maybe Google's intentionally punishing creators whose viewers use adblockers. But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?
Is there any hard, reliable data on how much money is "lost" by users with ad blockers? Some of the measures Google has taken with regards to ad blockers seem wholly disproportionate to my own impression of how common they really are.
Jeff Geerling has been sleuthing into this lately too - my biggest takeaway is that it's only viewer counts that are suffering, he's not seen revenue drop which is key. Viewer counts are vanity, revenue is sanity :)
1. It seems views from Premium users who use adblock might also not get counted—and I'm not sure if the revenue from a Premium view in that circumstance would be counted or not (more research needed).
2. YouTube's recommendation engine weights views heavily in the system, which means channels with a more technical, traditional desktop viewing audience (probably a substantial portion of HN users) will be most impacted, and will not be able to grow an audience to help fund projects, yadda yadda.
YouTube creators with younger, mobile, less FOSS-y, and less tech-savvy audiences are therefore rewarded with more views/mindshare.
I know some here are like "go get a REAL job, influencers are scum", but I think that discounts the helpful work of many tech creators. Not only in direct contributions to open source projects, but also in being a voice to balance out the paid 'product showcase' style videos for many tech products that come to market.
In other words: if adblock users disincentivize creators like me from spending time and resources on YouTube, then video content will more quickly settle into the online magazine/news status quo, where 99% of the articles you read are just PR spin. Which you could argue would bring about YouTube's downfall earlier... or would lead us even more quickly to an Idiocracy-style society :D
I'm not saying adblock is bad or wrong or anything—I can't stand the YT ad spam, so I pay for Premium. To each their own. In any case, YouTube shoulders some of the burden, but will be the main entity to profit in any scenario.
while true, choosing to base your income on the wellbeing of a company and its ad placement, no matter how well your video does or how good you are at producing videos is absolute insanity to me.
You become a slave to the latest monetization techniques and if you don't adopt them your revenue goes down, and your videos get put in front of fewer people, resulting in less income. This is bizarre to me, and definitely unwanted, because the things you need to do will never stop ramping up. A video used to do better because the thumbnail had a reaction face on it, now it's required just to keep your view count where it normally should be. People got used to that, and now ignore it. But it's still required if you want to get your video in front of people.
Now thumbnails must be rotated out frequently for the first few days of a video's life until the thumbnail which results in the most views is found. Soon people will become immune to this tactic just like they became immune to the reaction faces, and something new will come up to replace it. Except you don't stop with the reaction faces and the thumbnail rotation, you have to keep doing those.
Advertising requires this constant escalation to counter people's ever-increasing ability to ignore advertisements, and this will never stop so long as revenue determines how often a video is placed on the youtube.com homepage for a given viewer. it will never stop until advertisement is no longer a thing at all. a content creator must continually escalate what they are doing in order to stay right where they are in viewership, and even then they are subject to constant drops in revenue because of the whims of Google and advertising partners.
The whole thing is absolutely insane and I can't understand why someone would choose this to be their primary source of income. If people didn't choose to make youtube a career, there would be far fewer ads on youtube, because people would not be fighting so hard for views.
Google's browser holds almost the entire market share, and it's a browser that shifted to Manifest V3 to prevent ad blockers from being installed (which now require special effort from users to install and keep it/them working). Do people really believe that the decrease in the number of visits is as significant as Google is trying to make YouTubers believe through their algorithm?
I don't know... To me, it just seems like a textbook move from a Corporate Abuse Playbook. I bet someone at Google is laughing about it right now.
It could be the causality runs the other direction; I know that my youtube viewing is way down since they decided that they could decide what software I may/may not run on my computer.
Pretty sure it's caused by the algorithm not serving the user anymore... Unless I block a channel forever I only get served the same channels over and over or it's an endless reel of ai slop with that dead crappy voice on all kinds of variations...
Maybe views are simply down. I can't be the only one getting tired of the out-of-control sponsored videos. Even if you pay for YT Premium, you get hit with that crap on most of the popular channels.
Interesting, I thought it was due to absolutely horrible TV UI redesign which now shows exactly 1 and a bit of a video thumbnail on my 77" TV. Who the heck designs that.
I am not sure why this is a bug? Youtube is tracking people, this blocks them tracking people. A side effect of a view not being counted on Youtube, is 100% Youtube's problem, and doesn't effect the user in any way.
What's the meaning of this? Is Google trying to make content creators tell their viewers not to use adblockers? I don't think it's easylist's problem here. I don't understand.
But are really this many users actively using ad blockers? Presumably, a lot of users are on mobile devices where they are using the native app that doesn't even support this. If we subtract them, then a significant share of users on browser would have to be using EasyList.
So Youtube changed how views are counted and is blaming ad blockers?
Wouldn't surprise me if we now see a new trend of "click like, bell, and suscribe and don't forget to disable your ad blocker!".
Obviously they don't care about these views since they are not generating ad revenue. Youtubers who use view counts for sponsor deals etc do care though.
>Whatever, there's no problem for user. EP is for user and not for those so called creators or site owners.
It's sad to see how little sympathy there is for people other than oneself and how changes are affecting the larger ecosystem. Especially for a site as critical as YouTube to people's livelihoods.
Though having said that, at the same time I'm not surprised that someone who spends their time modifying sites to remove ads and analytics to make their personal experience better at the expense of everyone else would act this way would have this kind of selfish mindset.
Counter-argument: Youtube's aggressive anti-ads campaign resulted in failed loads, videos that appear stuck, etc. The more techy people would have updated, but others were left with the choice of a buggy experience or dreadfully long ads. Maybe people just got fed up with Youtube.
Some people I know do not ever change any settings on their computers, they certainly are worst hit by youtube's ads and have given up opening youtube links or close youtube links immediately after because there are 3-4 ads before the video even begins.
Putting my tinfoil hat on, maybe they knew ad blockers would mess with their new implementation and expected the freak out to mount "creators" against ad blockers?
I block ads on my favourite channel but then support the guy through Patreon every month. I figure he’ll get more revenue form that than the shitty ads
106 comments
[ 54.2 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadIf the answer to both is no, maybe Google's intentionally punishing creators whose viewers use adblockers. But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/digging-deeper-youtub...
1. It seems views from Premium users who use adblock might also not get counted—and I'm not sure if the revenue from a Premium view in that circumstance would be counted or not (more research needed).
2. YouTube's recommendation engine weights views heavily in the system, which means channels with a more technical, traditional desktop viewing audience (probably a substantial portion of HN users) will be most impacted, and will not be able to grow an audience to help fund projects, yadda yadda.
YouTube creators with younger, mobile, less FOSS-y, and less tech-savvy audiences are therefore rewarded with more views/mindshare.
I know some here are like "go get a REAL job, influencers are scum", but I think that discounts the helpful work of many tech creators. Not only in direct contributions to open source projects, but also in being a voice to balance out the paid 'product showcase' style videos for many tech products that come to market.
In other words: if adblock users disincentivize creators like me from spending time and resources on YouTube, then video content will more quickly settle into the online magazine/news status quo, where 99% of the articles you read are just PR spin. Which you could argue would bring about YouTube's downfall earlier... or would lead us even more quickly to an Idiocracy-style society :D
I'm not saying adblock is bad or wrong or anything—I can't stand the YT ad spam, so I pay for Premium. To each their own. In any case, YouTube shoulders some of the burden, but will be the main entity to profit in any scenario.
while true, choosing to base your income on the wellbeing of a company and its ad placement, no matter how well your video does or how good you are at producing videos is absolute insanity to me.
You become a slave to the latest monetization techniques and if you don't adopt them your revenue goes down, and your videos get put in front of fewer people, resulting in less income. This is bizarre to me, and definitely unwanted, because the things you need to do will never stop ramping up. A video used to do better because the thumbnail had a reaction face on it, now it's required just to keep your view count where it normally should be. People got used to that, and now ignore it. But it's still required if you want to get your video in front of people.
Now thumbnails must be rotated out frequently for the first few days of a video's life until the thumbnail which results in the most views is found. Soon people will become immune to this tactic just like they became immune to the reaction faces, and something new will come up to replace it. Except you don't stop with the reaction faces and the thumbnail rotation, you have to keep doing those.
Advertising requires this constant escalation to counter people's ever-increasing ability to ignore advertisements, and this will never stop so long as revenue determines how often a video is placed on the youtube.com homepage for a given viewer. it will never stop until advertisement is no longer a thing at all. a content creator must continually escalate what they are doing in order to stay right where they are in viewership, and even then they are subject to constant drops in revenue because of the whims of Google and advertising partners.
The whole thing is absolutely insane and I can't understand why someone would choose this to be their primary source of income. If people didn't choose to make youtube a career, there would be far fewer ads on youtube, because people would not be fighting so hard for views.
I don't know... To me, it just seems like a textbook move from a Corporate Abuse Playbook. I bet someone at Google is laughing about it right now.
Mine is just a sewage firehose so yes, I watch less now, and I use NewPipe on mobile to have a chance to see my subscriptions.
Infact, i used to watch videos because they used to be more "targeted" at problem solving when i ran into any issues.
but these days LLM ftw.
Does anyone realize how many missed views this implies??
Wouldn't surprise me if we now see a new trend of "click like, bell, and suscribe and don't forget to disable your ad blocker!".
Obviously they don't care about these views since they are not generating ad revenue. Youtubers who use view counts for sponsor deals etc do care though.
It's sad to see how little sympathy there is for people other than oneself and how changes are affecting the larger ecosystem. Especially for a site as critical as YouTube to people's livelihoods.
Though having said that, at the same time I'm not surprised that someone who spends their time modifying sites to remove ads and analytics to make their personal experience better at the expense of everyone else would act this way would have this kind of selfish mindset.
Agree to disagree. That's kind of the point of an ad blocker.
If you want to support creators, stop blocking their ads.