YouTube Shows Adblock Plus Users an Error Message Instead of Ads 205
An anonymous reader writes: Do you use YouTube with Adblock Plus? Some users have been getting the following message instead of ads: "An error occurred. Please try again later." The error message is only shown for the duration of the ad, meaning Adblock Plus is still technically getting the job done. But adblocking extensions typically block ads as well as remove them: For banner ads that means gaining back screen real estate on the webpage while for videos that means the content starts playing right away.
Time shifting (Score:4, Insightful)
If you extrapolate the arms race out, I can see victory being that you time-shift the video while the ad-blocker lets the ad play to /dev/null.
They can't force me to watch the ads, because they can't force me to watch their content. I would give up their content before watching ads, the same way as I don't watch teevee with ads. But as long as they want it to be freely available, they can only temporarily frustrate the ad blockers.
Re:Time shifting (Score:4, Informative)
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Sites that are that anal about you *seeing* the ads will often want to show you an ad AGAIN if you rewind.
I also loved the last presidential election - Up here in Alaska one of our senate seats was up for election. The major parties spent something like $120 per registered voter on advertising. Democrat incumbent vs Republican challenger. If you had an IP from AK, everything was about the election of that seat.
Hell, I now have a greasemonkey script to remove the most annoying sites from search results.
Re:Time shifting (Score:4, Informative)
Sites that are that anal about you *seeing* the ads will often want to show you an ad AGAIN if you rewind.
In that case, the last part of my comment applies: just stop watching. There's plenty of other stuff to do.
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I can tolerate ads as long as they align with the content, are somewhat interesting, do not lie or attempt to create false associations, informative, not repeated again and again and again. You tube is made bad enough by not being able to block certain uploaders and having them flood any searches or the you tube home screens with their shit, that is super fucking annoying. I wonder where more targeted advertisements might be possible, not targeted you but targeting them with ie dislike M$ simply block all
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And then sit back and watch a video... until BAM, a banner pops up, which you have to close manually. Youtube is becoming TV very quick. It's just a matter of time until they start overlaying countdowns: "NEW SEASON IN 49 days 23:33:42..."
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Then they will go the way of the TV and the next video provider in line gets my eyes.
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A lot of the non-fiction content that I use youtube for would simply move to other sites.
Youtube is great for the do-it-yourselfer, but these are also people who ad-block. If they force me out, a lot of the content providers I use will also be moving.
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Just wait until ads are spliced into video stream itself. No way to block that other than some pattern recognition scheme.
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Just wait until ads are spliced into video stream itself. No way to block that other than some pattern recognition scheme.
Yeah, I believe there are readily available algorithms. The tagging would be easy to crowdsource, a button in the browser that the user could click when they see an ad.
If the ad industry teams up with the major OS and hardware companies and come up with some crap that prevents user space software from accessing streaming video data directly, you could still use the microphone on your computer and run an algorithm on the audio.
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If the ad industry teams up with the major OS and hardware companies and come up with some crap that prevents user space software from accessing streaming video data directly
This is what I'd like to see personally: the ad companies need to team up with Microsoft to make it technically nearly impossible to block ads (of all types) on Windows machines. MS is basically reinventing itself as an advertising/marketing company anyway, so this would be a great fit for them.
It'll be fun listening to Windows users w
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They don't want to splice the ads into the video stream, because that makes their advertising less targeted and their tracking harder.
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No reason (other than horsepower) why they can't splice on the fly with an ad just as targeted as whatever they show at the start.
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No need to time-shift, that's now how YouTube ads work. The ads are stored on different servers to the main content, so it's easy to filter them by simply denying access to those hosts. You can do it at the router level to clean up your smart TV and wifi device's YouTube apps.
The issue here is that the YouTube playback code now shows an error when it can't access those servers. Previously it would just give up and play the content after a few seconds (they kept the timeout short to improve the user experien
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Interstitials in the main stream is probably the endgame of this. Then you wouldn't be able to tell them apart. The problem is that it's hard to do that in a sane way over a live stream of content that has no natural breaks.
For what it's worth, Ustream's interstitial ads via their Flash player (they still won't offer me an HTML5 player with the current version of Seamonkey, which uses the same rendering engine as Firefox and is usually the current FF version of Gecko) are done via a separate .swf served fr
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Until you find a way to offload that ad-loading and -displaying to a dump server that hands you the return code to display the actual content back.
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the end-game is having to load the ads from the server but not display them.
That is what I said, yes. LOL
But you can't "verify display" you can only verify time lapse, that why the endgame is time-shifting; the blocker waits until the server thinks the ad "displayed" and then records the content; user comes back and just watches content.
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Even that is questionable, if they use javascript to verify the display of the ads and refuse to deliver the content unless that is verified
It'd be pretty trivial to intercept the JS and alter it to send back the code that the ads were viewed even though they weren't.
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because they can't force me to watch their content
That would seem to imply that, if they wish to force the ads, the remaining option is to simply not watch, rather than steal. In fact, the very next sentence confirms this:
I would give up their content before watching ads
Most people choose to build their strawmen from straw, you seem to have chosen to use willful ignorance. No matter, really, as both burn equally well.
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If ignorance burned as readily as straw, this world would have been purged of it long ago.
Yeah, just like the straw! Oh, wait...
Works for me (Score:3)
I didn't see any ads. I have adblocker with easylist and an anti-adblocker blocker list.
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I had a few error messages on YouTube with Chrome and uBlock. Hit F5 and the video plays. I have Easylist and the anti-ad-block list enabled, as well as a load of other stuff. Might only be affecting certain regions or a certain percentage of users.
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I didn't see any ads either, I pay for youtube red as part of my indispensable google music account.
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I strictly use a custom blocking list with "allow ads that are nice enough bribe us" disabled. And I will just as happily block a single .js file as I will entire domains that clearly have no other purpose in life than to serve ads or track people. (And also stuff like that stupid Sharethis or whatever has roll-over pop-ups for dozens of social media sites, since it's something I would never use and it's annoying too.) Whenever I start with a new computer, one of the first places I go is Drudge Report, beca
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Whelp, no more YouTube for me (Score:3)
Re:Whelp, no more YouTube for me (Score:5, Informative)
uBlock Origin is still working just fine. I suggest you move away from ABP immediately and shift over to something which hasn't, yet, been corrupted by the industry.
Re:Whelp, no more YouTube for me (Score:4, Informative)
Ublock Origin on Firefox. I get the error message.
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No errors for me, but I'm blocking based on DNS info using the list maintained at http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/ [yoyo.org]
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I get that error sometimes, always blame it on youtube and just hit reload when it happens.
There is anti-antiadblocking, but it is not yet necessary for youtube.
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I'm getting this error consistently today in most, if not all, of the videos I tried to watch. It goes away after 10 seconds or so, by itself, if you leave the page open.
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Same.
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uBlock Origin is still working just fine. I suggest you move away from ABP immediately and shift over to something which hasn't, yet, been corrupted by the industry.
More than that, uBlock bases itself around higher performance than ABP. That was the reason I switched.
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For #3, I believe you are. Go to the filter lists, and there should be another list you can enable under "Social Media" which blocks FB/G+ buttons and tracking. I believe it's not enabled by default because for people who use FB a lot it can have undesirable side effects.
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I use uBlock Origin and have been getting that error message for a few months.
I just hit F5 and the video almost always starts to play for me.
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Funny story... I wandered over to youtube to check if I get the error (didn't get it; ublock origin) and I ended up watching some cat furry videos.
Malware, of course... actually, I'd be impressed if they got some past all my levels of protection.
Malware in ads isn't youtube video ads, it is other stuff. These are simply obnoxious video content that I refuse to consume, not random code that runs on your computer.
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I ended up watching some cat furry videos.
You... You what? ;-)
Anyway, YouTube video ads are a bit different to ads on other sites. They play before the video. The channel owner (or channel hijacker if they have been copyright-jacked) can decide how long they last and if they are skippable. They are served from Google/YouTube's own servers and are just normal videos like any other on the site, so apart from blowing up your speakers with a nice square wave or giving the user an epileptic fit there isn't much scope for malicious behaviour.
Getting rid
Only a matter of time (Score:5, Insightful)
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Same as everything else, market share can go down just as easily as up. They don't have a monopoly on web servers, so any monopoly they have is a "natural" one that would go away as soon as people like it less.
Geocities had lots of market share, AOL had market share, napster had market share, myspace had market share. I'm still using ICQ, it used to be the #1 instant messenger.
You can't be an internet monopoly unless you tolerate ad-blockers, because if you fight them and succeed, it means those users are m
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Yeah, but there's little network effect - if another provider popped up and people start using them, converting from YouTube takes little effort - all the embeds and links go to the new site quite trivially.
This is unlike Facebook or eBay where there are significant network effects that cause people to stay - Facebook in having many users which means their friends and family
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Re:Only a matter of time (Score:5, Informative)
They hardly even scratch the surface of copyright violations. Go look for any album on Youtube, they are all there and have been there for years. They just don't care.
Google doesn't care, the copyright owners do. They care a lot, and they make Google handle it. If the copyright owners were unhappy with those albums being there, they would be taken down. But they're okay with it because they have agreements in place, so Google sends the copyright owner a piece of the ad revenue. All of this is automated so you can upload any random music video and odds are very good that it will stay up... but various restrictions will be applied to comply with the agreements.
For example, I made a tribute video for my mother in law's funeral recently, and used three songs that she loved as the soundtrack. I uploaded it to YouTube to make it easy to share with the extended family, and if I go look at it in my video manager, I note that it is flagged as "not eligible for monetization" and "blocked in some countries". If I click on it to get details, I find that Google has automatically identified the songs in it, and their owners, and applied rules based on agreements with those owners. Specifically, one of the songs in monetized by the copyright owner, which is why I can't make money off of it (not that I care, or that there would be any money to be made) and two others are blocked in Germany because Google doesn't have agreements with the copyright owners in that jurisdiction. Oh, and my video also apparently can't be played on set top boxes, again because Google's licensing agreements don't cover that usage.
So, your perception that all of that music on YouTube is somehow sliding under the radar and that Google will "crack down" in the future is completely wrong. It isn't "under the radar" at all, and Google not only does "crack down" on copyrighted content that may be infringing, but has the cracking thoroughly automated. But, Google has arranged such comprehensive licenses that you don't notice because it seems like everything is there.
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No. There are no agreements when Frozzle1093 uploads a "radiohead" album. There aren't any ads at all on those videos.
Does Radiohead want there to be ads on those videos? It's their choice; they (or their label, depending on those agreements) set the policy and Google just enforces it. Somehow I think you actually already knew that, else you wouldn't have picked "Radiohead", since they are a rather unique group who takes an unusually light hand with copyright, and has actually switched to self-publishing rather than using a label, in large part to give them more freedom in how they handle such matters.
You just got caught.
Huh?
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do no evil (Score:2)
that's interesting. i've often gotten that error message, but I assumed it was a browser fail and used a different browser. Can I wait it out and then the add starts? that's a dirty business on goog's part. do no evil!
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Well within their rights (Score:2, Insightful)
Google is well within their rights to do this. They offer a $10/mo service to go ad-free. There isn't any excuse to block ads on Youtube.
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No, your disagreement with the price is not an excuse.
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Expecting to be able to watch cat movies with no financial cost and no advertisements is unreasonable.
If can only watch cat movies after being forced to watch an ad, I'll skip the cat movies. I hope you won't find it unreasonable that Google has to pay all the expenses for setting up a huge server network for videos that I'm not watching.
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so use the same account for everyone, stupid?
If you're going to do that, you might as well use an adblocker, right ?
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No.
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The biggest difference you'll see between the two approaches is that one case is a lot more reliable than the other.
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Yep. I agree that using ad-blocking software is not just reasonable, but essential, in the vast majority of cases, seeing as how they tent to bog things down, serve up various malwares, and generally act as digital pestilence, but in the case of the ads on Youtube, nope, not seeing that. I don't get the anger of having to watch a 15 second ad to support all the content you are getting for free, content which is supported by those ads. What exactly is just so wrong with that?
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Your internet connection doesn't pay Youtube---or any other site.
Your internet provider needs to make money; Youtube needs to make money. You have to pay them both.
If you pay one with money and the other with a few seconds of ad-watching, well, that's their decision on how they want to operate.
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Oh? Please de-idiot me.
The advertising industry is dying (Score:2, Interesting)
It's pretty amazing. I don't own a TV, don't listen to radio, ane don't see any ads online. I have no fucking clue what movies are in theatres, what shows are on TV, or the names of up and coming celebrities. It is pure fucking BLISS.
Life is even more fantastic once you eradicate all that bullshit.
Not just adblock (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't matter which adblocker you use or which browser you use. I've been following this story closely, and this is what I've learned:
Whether or not you get this error (which lasts as long as an advertisement, by the way) depends on how many ads your YouTube account has blocked recently. For example, if you log out of your YouTube account you won't get the error. If you switch to a Google (or YouTube) account that you haven't used in a while, you won't get the error. And if a couple of days later you log back in with the original account, you won't get the error. But if you watch a bunch of videos with ads that get blocked, the error will start again.
And yes, it doesn't matter which adblocking software you use. uBlock users are reporting the error as well. YouTube support has basically said, "This is happening because of something we did, but it wasn't intentional. And since it wasn't intentional, we're not going to do anything about it, so you'll have to contact your adblocker's support."
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Whether or not you get this error (which lasts as long as an advertisement, by the way) depends on how many ads your YouTube account has blocked recently. For example, if you log out of your YouTube account you won't get the error.
I NEVER log in to YouTube - don't even have an account, except perhaps insofar as I have a Gmail account, (which I never use), because of Android. And I DO see the error message. It DOESN'T last the length of an ad - it lasts for a second or two. I'm running both Flashblock and Adblock Edge - Adblock for obvious reasons, and Flashblock because I often have multiple YouTube tabs open and only want one to play at a time. And I have a Greasemonkey script that automatically turns off Autoplay.
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I've seen the beha
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It doesn't matter which adblocker you use or which browser you use. I've been following this story closely, and this is what I've learned:
Whether or not you get this error (which lasts as long as an advertisement, by the way) depends on how many ads your YouTube account has blocked recently. For example, if you log out of your YouTube account you won't get the error. If you switch to a Google (or YouTube) account that you haven't used in a while, you won't get the error. And if a couple of days later you log back in with the original account, you won't get the error. But if you watch a bunch of videos with ads that get blocked, the error will start again.
And yes, it doesn't matter which adblocking software you use. uBlock users are reporting the error as well. YouTube support has basically said, "This is happening because of something we did, but it wasn't intentional. And since it wasn't intentional, we're not going to do anything about it, so you'll have to contact your adblocker's support."
For example, if you log out of your YouTube account you won't get the error.
Well that might explain why I haven't been seeing this. I stopped logging into my account years ago when Google bought them out and started trying to link everything to G+, and then the real names policy sealed the deal.
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I got the message yesterday. Not logged in, not viewed any videos for at least a week. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with some hidden limit or being logged in, it's just random.
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Yes, but not until you've watched a bunch of videos with blocked ads. And are you sure you're not logged into Google, maybe for gmail or something? And if you stay off YouTube for a few days, you will find the error has gone away, logged in or not. I don't know how long you have go without a blocked ad to have the error disappear.
It appears that this error may be YouTube's way of punishing people who watch a lot of videos with blocked a
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Flash... player?
Do people still use that for YouTube?
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Not everybody is worried about everything being "tracked" by the very people offering the thing. ;)
The tracking that most people dislike is where facebook or some advertising company tracks them while they're on a totally different site.
That the website you actually went to knows what you did while you were there? That is not automatically bad. What exactly is your complaint? Did you know that google (owner of youtube) doesn't sell that information?
Logging enables features such as view history, which makes
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That is one of those things where if they're that crazy or on that many hallucinogens to even do it, then I might very well believe that they thought they were somewhere else, like in a bathroom on a spaceship.
I believe them that it isn't intentional; they do have bugs in their other services. I can understand their point; they don't like ad-blockers or approve of them, and they have no reason to care about the bug.
I think it was polite of them to acknowledge that the unexpected behavior was correlated to s
Workaround (Score:2)
Yeah someone figured that out a while ago, well its nice to see the cause being identified (Guess they don't care THAT much about net neutrality afterall...)
But at least they figured out a solution already and this works for me.
Start a youtube video from link.
when it does not load, click on the right right sidebar videos.
that one loads fine (is it a bug? hope not)
Now press ALT + LEFT ARROW and poof your original video in all its glory. Works most times for me.
I actually thought it was flashblock screwing up
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I actually thought it was flashblock screwing up but my wife has noticed it for months and complained that youtube is "unusable".
I for one would also first blame YouTube not working well as they start presenting errors. I'm not going to wait for an error to go away by itself - error means error to me, not "wait a while". It's anyway odd that they'd start showing errors instead of a "please switch off AdBlock" message.
How about a totally client-side adblocker? (Score:2)
...YouTube Red, but not in sweden... (Score:2)
Is there any way I can pay youtube a small amount of money, so I wouldn't have to deal with ads at all, that isn't "Youtube Red"?
"YouTube Red is not currently available in Sweden."
Youtube redoing the ads is the reason I installed ABP again; before that a simple DNS block did the trick.
I Honestly Don't Mind (Score:2)
Re:uBlock Origin master race (Score:4)
Most likely it depends on which block rules that you use, not the AdBlock plug-in itself.
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Oh shut up. I have Ublock origin and I'm getting this message on Firefox.
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Flash? Huh? Youtube still supports flash player video?
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I use Adblock Plus and don't see any ads or errors on Youtube. I use uBlock Origin on a different computer, not seeing ads or errors there either.
Re:Or you could pay for the service. (Score:4, Informative)
"YouTube Red is not currently available in Argentina".
If youtube doesn't care about offering their paid service in my country, it means they don't want my money. If they don't want my money, then I won't see their ads either.
Fuck google.
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youtube-dl does a good job of removing ads, as well as geo and age restrctions. I stopped using youtube when Google took it over because they fucked up commenting. It used to be fun, now it's not. If somebody sends me a link to a youtube video I'll just snatch it with youtube-dl. No ads, no geo resrictions, no age restrictions, no muss, no fuss.
Honestly, how Google could fuck up an existing good service like youtube is beyond my understanding, and yet they still did it.
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Youtube red is not all about copyright. It's about offline videos, ad-free experience and "youtube original" series and movies. None of which need any sort of copyright and shit.
And, you know, google has thousands of employees. Many of them in my country, since 2006 (http://www.cuitonline.com/detalle/33709585229/google-argentina-s.r.l.html) so yeah, I guess google *CAN* do all of that at the same time.
As for copyright... COME ON! Google is a den of piracy. It's full of TV series and songs that pay, in most
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No, he is asking to do himself what the service does without buying the service.
You seem to be under the impression that if I use my computer to do the work of removing ads, it is the same as Youtube somehow doing the work. It is not and it is not using youtube's services without buying them either.
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The service is either free, or it is not. If they want to call it free, and show ads, they have no claim that viewing the ads are required. They can try to make sure they are displayed, but that is all.
People who really don't understand ethics seem to jump right onto the ad bandwagon, I wonder why that is? Maybe they're using their employer's "ethics" instead of having an honest discussion?
If watching the ads was required, then it would be false advertising to call it free. False advertising is something a
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An excellent and cogent post; I would mod you up if I had points.
But to answer this question:
People who really don't understand ethics seem to jump right onto the ad bandwagon, I wonder why that is?
That's because a significant portion of the American populace has turned into corporate apologists, happy to defend the very worst examples of corporate behavior possible.
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I like this approach, because the guys like you that are free-loading off of web search or links will have to stay in the cache for the search to keep misleading users to you, and then when I don't see the content I can just add cache:// to the start of the address and view the content on a server that I have better relationship with.
Your plea at the end reminds me of the guys standing on the side of the freeway ramp with a sign, begging for money.
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I usually write code hat check to see if the ad content was pushed out to the client. If not disables the site for that web browser and IP address for an hour.
Do BingBot and Googlebot retrieve ads? If not, enjoy being hard to find in search engines.
Besides, in the era of IPv4 address exhaustion, ISPs are using carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to put a hundred or a thousand users behind one IPv4 address. If one of them doesn't load your ads, for reasons such as a transient network failure or not having the proprietary Adobe Flash Player installed or even being blind (and thus unable to view images), do you block access to the site for all of them?
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How much do sites need to pay for the connection, servers and bandwidth? Nowadays you can get 100Mbps uncapped VPS from OVH for 5eur/month and dedicated quadcore server for 9eur/month. Add couple of those running Varnish or something as reverse proxy for your site (and perhaps put free Cloudflare on top of that too) and then get one of their beefier servers as backend, costs 25eur/month. And if you cannot afford to pay that much for a site per month and/or not get enough donations etc, then perhaps you shou
Not everybody can run a home server (Score:2)
on my home server
Most people don't have a home server, for one or more of the following reasons:
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It was the 5 minute long unskippable ads that finally forced me to block all ads on youtube about a year ago. So yep, know where you're coming from on that.