I came across the stickied weekly thread at uBlock Origin’s sub-Reddit. WARNING: It’s a long and complicated read.
The TL;DR takeaway is thus (especially for those who use Firefox):
- Click the uBlock Origin icon on Firefox’s menu bar
- You’ll see a three-gear icon at the bottom right. Click this to open the dashboard.
- Click the “Purge all caches” button at the top.
- Click the “Update now” button at the top.
Note: You may have to do this several times per day since YouTube keeps changing their anti-adblock scripts. However, the diligent work, from all the volunteers at uBlock Origin, have been able to keep pace. I haven’t seen any ads NOR any anti-adblock warnings in the past 48 hours.
I would imagine that most people aren’t on YouTube except when people send them links to videos. Once they deactivate their ad blocker to watch a three minute cat video and get four preroll ads and a couple of midrolls they’ll immediately turn their ad blocker off or just never come back.
This diminishes engagement, doing the exact opposite of what they’re trying to accomplish.
By all accounts YouTube is profitable, it’s just owned by greedy cunts.
Nearly everyone I know watches YouTube in some kind or another regularly. Most of them on a smart TV or mobile with ads. I think the amount of people watching youtube regularly is vastly higher than the amount of people just watching it when they get sent one video. Espechially since most people use phones to communicate with others and will watch the Videos sent to them with that device and the original YouTube App.