Google is desperate to get more YouTube subscribers, so they’re messing with anyone that tries to use ad filtering on YouTube. When they steeply raised their rates for YouTube Music and YouTube Video I dropped the service and switched to Amazon Music (my limit is $9.99/mo, about cost of a album). So in their greediness they’re also shooting themselves in the foot, and now that I see advertisements when I cast YouTube to the television, they’re very annoying. Instead of pre-roll ads they interrupt monetized programming at odd places to play short ads. So you have to deduce it’s purposeful conduct to annoy users in order to get them to subscribe and generate more revenue. Consequently, I don’t feel at all bad when I block ads on my computers and uBlock Origin does a great job at updating its filters for YouTube as well allowing manual updating. There are also YouTube programs like FreeTube that let you filter ads and view YouTube with privacy (need a VPN to mask home IP). And being a dedicated opensource application they’re way more efficient than a browser at playing videos, and you can even subscribe to channels outside of YouTube (not great for creators and their numbers or monetization but a valid option). So you don’t have to let Google and YouTube mess with you, or cave to their subscription pressure.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/youtube-accused-throttling-cpu-performance-users-adblock-installed
By Tyler Durden
As if the noticeably longer ads on YouTube weren’t unbearable enough, the streaming video platform is now also in the spotlight due to slowing down PCs for users that have AdBlock installed.
That was the topic of a new PCGamer.com article, which noted that “AdBlock users have been reporting widespread performance issues with the extension enabled on YouTube”.
A thread in the YouTube subreddit detailed that AdBlock enabling would cause slow load times and increased CPU usage when on YouTube.
“This messes up the resources on the computer as a whole. It just kills Chrome it seems,” one person wrote.
The author tested the issue himself and found that his CPU usage rose about 17% when using AdBlock on the site. While not a catastrophic increase in processor use, the author did note that “lower-end laptops mainly used for browsing could start having heat problems”.
The issue also affects YouTube Premium subscribers using AdBlocker on other sites, frustrating users who expect an ad-free experience in line with YouTube’s Terms of Service.
User JotaroKujoxXx mentioned their laptop’s unusually high activity, while another user suspected storage issues. Sarah James, a Guides Writer, observed a 15-18% performance drop when using the extension with Premium.
YouTube’s communications manager, Christopher Lawton, indicated that such issues will persist as the platform enhances its ad-blocker detection. Consequently, YouTube often gets blamed for any extension-related problems, though in some cases, it may not be directly responsible.
Lawton told PCGamer: “Loading delays experienced by Adblock and AdBlock Plus users are not caused by our ad blocker detection efforts.”
Raymond Hill of uBlock Origin also commented about the issue on Twitter: “I investigated a bit the performance regressions, and the cause is many distinct code paths, [which] affect many sites.”
“Since it affects both Adblock Plus and AdBlock, the performance regression hits harder those who had the bad idea to use both at once,” he wrote.