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 :)
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/digging-deeper-youtub...
YouTube showed me the same phishing ads depicting an AI version of the Canadian Prime Minister.
Why should I not filter ads from a provider who is OK with people stealing from me?
Don't forget to like, subscribe, hype, hit the bell, and turn off your adblocker! Thankfully I think Sponsorblock has a section for those points in the videos.
Seems almost incredible that no one is pointing out the YT incentives behind this. YT has a war on two fronts: ad-blockers and in-video sponsors. That is because in-video sponsors don't get YT money, so they want to be in the monetization loop. So, by decreasing the views, sponsors are now less attracted to in-video sponsorships and YT ads look better in comparison.
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?
Every now and then I have accessed youtube on a PC with no adblocker.
It's absolutely dire. I mean, ridiculously bad. Unbearable.
If it's that or nothing, it's the easiest of choices.
Oh how incredibly convenient.
Plus, making ad blocking a channel owner's problem is kind of genius.
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.
Great, finally a thread Youtube employees might be looking at.
Ever since the election you guys RAMPED up the ads, please drop it back down. It's becoming unbearable to get a 50 minute podcast AD every 5 minutes of video I watch when I'm shingling a roof and my phone is in the truck. There HAS to be some limits here.
We're ripe for a situation where YouTube subpoenas ISPs MPAA 2.0 style over their users habitually accessing video and audio content streams without paying or validating through their ad chain. Google has every way from Sunday to identify users very accurately and I see it being an option on the table to ban accounts to the name, and potentially seek damages. RIAA did it for MP3s, MPAA for video content; rule of thirds?
Ultimately most sane people see ads as vomitpuke and this will continue to be a contention.
No, I won't turn my ad blocker off. In fact, I go further and use uMatrix to block ALL third party content by default on ALL websites (uBlock in advanced mode can also do this). That's on top of an aggressive DNS-level blacklists targeting ads and trackers.
Some manual adjustment to allow CDN on some websites is needed, but 95% of the cruft is left out. That cruft is usually malware in a broad sense: ads, trackers, embedded Youtube videos that seem benign but allow Google to follow users across the Internet, etc.
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.
From the GitHub issue it becomes clear that blocking happens by the EasyPrivacy blocklist. The blocked URL youtube.com/api/stats/atr is/can also be used for tracking users, this is why some are arguing that it legitimately on that blocklist.
The tracking not malicious. YouTube has a legitimate interest to verify views, e.g. to recommend popular videos to others. If a view counter was increased by just invoking an API, view counts could be manipulated easily. Also see the video [1] from ... 13 years ago ... so it might be slighly outdated. Just slightly.
Let me guess they are not blaming the terrible ad experience that cause people to use ad blockers?
Go complain to Youtube, where the views should be measured on the backend instead of via an API call.
Does anyone realize how many missed views this implies??
What is the technical challenge behind stealthily blocking ads? Making the backend unaware if ads are actually being seen or not - just fetched.
This may even serve as some accelerationism for invasive web tech where ad middlemen may resort to doing render checks. The invasive practice may with low likelihood advance some web technologies into blocking such measures.
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.
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.
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.
Hordes of people skipping ads is a reasonable price to pay for market monopoly.
Maybe a "view", however YT defines it, is a poor metric? It doesn't show engagement and it's time for YTers to have better means for analytics.
I have an Android TV device, and YT has been so horrible with its constant ads popping up, that I have to put it on MUTE to prevent any further brainrot.
I wonder when they're going to blame me muting my TV and harm their viewership. Or maybe they will just prevent me from being able to mute it.
Heaven forbid Google/Youtube actually count/measure the streaming output themselves. Same goes to CBS/Paramount whose whole service breaks (on some streams) when using a pihole.
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.
> I don't want views going down for creators on youtube.
Agree to disagree. That's kind of the point of an ad blocker.
If you want to support creators, stop blocking their ads.
I’ve been using Brave browser to watch YouTube for years. Haven’t seen one ad in years. I’m probably part of the problem
Lengths Google are going to fighting ad blockers when really it's a small niche of people who can't stand to use their platform without one is getting silly and this feels like a tactic to try and push the onus on making people turn them off on their favorite youtubers
Yesterday I wanted to watch a video of a song which was made originally english. It was auto translating lyrics to german. I just speak some spanish and some english. Couldn't decide if I should be annoyed with it translating to a language I just know a handful of words or should be thankful because it's trying to help me learn more of it.
Off-topic, but this 9to5google blog is the first I’ve seen “top comment” embedded inline with the blog post. That’s really cool. It’s more like how you’d comment on a google doc rather than threaded conversations appended to the end of it. I’d like to see more exploration of this UX…
If you're unfamiliar with the creator dashboard there is a spot reserved for notifications from YouTube. This should have been front and center last week, not buried in a creator help thread. Why wasn’t it? That's open to speculation.
As someone with a small tech channel, I'm glad I was following this. If not, I would have spent the last week swapping out thumbnails and video titles, which seem about as effective as percussive maintenance. But hey, you have to try something.
Well over a decade ago a gentleman by the name of Brian Brushwood said, and I'm paraphrasing, “YouTube is like working for an AI manager that never tells you what it wants but punishes you severely if you get it wrong.”
Welcome to 2025.
The fact that a client-side change can impact reported views is wild. Its so wildly the wrong place to track views that it forces me to wonder if its an intentional & malicious decision by Google to mobilize YouTube creators against the idea of viewer privacy.
Am I the only person who is confused by the anger from people who use a free service (like YouTube) or participate in a gig service (like Uber), and get upset when it doesn't go their way? Meaning, they get upset when they cannot make money off services provided by a company. Seems like entitlement to me.
I wish their algorithm would show me videos with my actual interests, instead of some kind of repeat material click maximization
No problem YouTube. I'd rather give my data to the browser extension which brings back dislikes.
TechLinked's take is pretty good (as usual): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ5pATTvc2o
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.
View counts are on borrowed time anyway, I’m sure.
I use uBo which uses easylist, and when I watch youtube videos they are marked as viewed, so this explanation does not seem likely?
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.
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.
I use Newpipe on my mobile, and Adnauseum + Firefox on my laptop to escape from Youtube Ad's.
I have been contacted more than once by close family members because of ads that look like system prompts inside Youtube feeds asking to delete photos, free up space, clear phone from viruses, and this is not even including AI slop and porn stuff.
Blocking ads is the way to go, and I am sure creators will survive this.
I wonder if YouTube/creators can tell at what point viewers abandon the video - and I wonder if they can tell how many times I’ve opened a video, been greeted with another grating Liberty Mutual ad, and immediately closed the tab.
WAN Show is going to be wild this week
YouTube's messaging is the more frustrating part about all this. Panic might drive more creators toward direct monetization, that might just be the better net outcome.
YouTube is history, last time I used it was covid time. Blame AI if you want but time don´t stop for anything. That´s it and that´s all.
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...
I don't think it's a counting issue but that the various experiments that YouTube did recently to block adblockers are causing people with adblockers to leave the page early before the video starts playing, because they are greated with infinite loading spinners, incomplete page loads or in the best case 10 second delays until the video starts.
I happily watch the embedded ad-segments of YouTubers, but not the aggressive scam/slop-ads that YouTube puts before the actual videos thank-you-very-much.
Dear Youtube. Please, just give us an API to get the video data for the _premium_ subscribers.
I can use my own viewer then, instead of relying on your ever-worsening website.
It's win-win. I keep paying you, you get accurate view counts.
Kinda ironic — the tools meant to block ads end up hurting creators by messing with view counts.
"Because you're using adblockers, we're going to punish them."
Sounds about right for Google.
The difference where they see dramatic PC views dropping and phone and tablets remaining steady and the quote do seem to hint at ad blockers being the cause.
But it's not at all clear to me 100% if this really is an ad blocker problem / there's not any real proof.
Meanwhile I'm getting another add for "stuck poop" and scam health products ...
Could we test this theory with an unlisted video?
Ah yes because they can’t measure streams with blocked ads.
And what’s up with that “subscribing”, never saw the use for it, yet many (respectful, great) creators beg for it. I almost feel bad for not using the feature. I mean, I’m watching the content, that must count for something?
YouTube finally was able to block me from using ublock (and all the workarounds) a couple of weeks ago. This has finally prompted me to shift from Chrome to Firefox.
Its frustrating to see how HN commenters just jumped onto conclusions without even doing any bit of critical thinking.
The top comment on HN says
> So Youtube changed how views are counted and is blaming ad blockers?
When even a cursory look would show that if you block stats-aggregation endpoint .. stats go down. Sometimes it is occam's razor.
It seems politically inconceivable to discuss advertisement network security, ethics, consolidation, negligence, etc etc. I cannot more strongly recommend running an ad blocker.
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?
YouTube has ads?
Could it be the recommendation algorithm is so terrible that people can't even?
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.
>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.
I'm so sick of tech companies choosing to build something a certain weird way and then in the media blaming something else.
My bill for access to phone and internet where all data is celular, runs $3000~6000/yr,and includes a domain and email, I refuse to watch any adds ever or pay for anything else that is not property that can be re sold, rented, insured, transfered, or returned cause it's junk, or I dont like it. I pay my fucking rent, have payed for a long time, and know that there is another way that everything can be configured that sends the "platforms" packing. The difference is a world where everyone self manages there affairs, does there best, can work and contribute, while living there best lives, or the nasty shit show we have now with a tiny minority attempting to puppet the whole world and everything in it.
i used to watch lots of videos, but since LLM came into being i find them much faster than watching videos.
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.
It seems like this statement from YouTube[1] and this Github issue (referenced by granzymes[2]) have key information being missed by a lot of commenters.
From YouTube:
> Viewers Using Ad Blockers & Other Content Blocking Tools: Ad blockers and other extensions can impact the accuracy of reported view counts. Channels whose audiences include a higher proportion of users utilizing such tools may see more fluctuations in traffic related to updates to these tools.
Quoting granzymes:
> According to the GitHub issue, YouTube didn’t change anything. There are two endpoints that can be used to attribute a view. One is called multiple times throughout a video playback and has been in the easylist privacy filter for years. The other is called at the start of a playback, and was just added to the list (the timing lines up with the reports of view drops from tech YouTubers).
Source from the GitHub issue for easylist: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375#issuecomme...
[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/373195597
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45277768