Blocking Advertisements on Youtube

[mseducation]

The usual add blockers I had used are no longer working. Are there strategies for removing advertisements for all students on Youtube these days? 

[JantechNJ]

Yes, I believe there was another thread that addressed this. I've tried multiple adblockers and none have been consistently effective. We have recommended to educators that they plan ahead and post/play their videos in Google Classroom or insert them into a Google Slides presentation. It's the only guaranteed adblocker.

[don_b_nashville]

The Chocolate Factory has mysterious ways. To us it looks like one big Google, but internally each product is run by a team. Some teams play nicely with the others; other teams have a mandate that they have to follow in order to meet their corporate goals. 

YouTube has been on a campaign this year to grab as many eyeballs for ads as technically possible. Their salaries and incentive compensation depend on growth from quarter to quarter (assuming they don't have even smaller time units for metrics.) It seems evident that part of the YouTube team is dedicated to the whack-a-mole task of reverse engineering and dismantling each ad avoidance technique or site as they emerge. The Workspace for Education support umbrella never extended to YouTube. This is why for years there was no real help for educator admins who were trying to get out of restricted mode for a given organizational unit. 

With that as context, if I were on Team YouTube, I'd be stalking this forum looking for new sites and techniques to snuff out. If y'all are out there, please say "Hi" in a comment. 

JantechNJ's advice is about the best we're going to get given how everyone is motivated in this puzzle. 

[JantechNJ]

Yes, I've thrown in the towel - waving the white flag. I've spent too many hours testing, pushing and rescinding adblocking Chrome extensions. It takes seconds to copy and paste a YouTube URL into a blank slide. I've asked teachers to just keep a blank slides file open if they want to show a video on the fly. 

[llennon]

I agree the easiest option is to paste URL into a slide deck. Not everyone likes it, but it works. For now.

[ddelboccio]

Here is a strange trick one of my teachers just made me aware of...........

Apparently, if you insert a dash in the word "Youtube" in the URL, it forces the link to fullscreen mode?

Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8w_pMRHMtA

https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=B8w_pMRHMtA

[jwisniewski]

I can't believe this works. Blew my mind. I have to test it some more.

[ddelboccio]

Me too!  I even put the dash in other places and it DID NOT work.  The dash HAS to be after the "t" in the word "yout-ube".

[alexgrutza]

I'd be careful what you enter, as a whois of that yout-ube.com doesn't necessarily come back as owned and operated by Google, which it probably is but just be careful

[ddelboccio]

Interestingly enough, if you go the actual web page it is a 3rd party that created this specifically for this purpose.

https://www.yout-ube.com/

So it looks like just another in the long list of websites that did this in the past, and not an actual Youtube feature.

[ddelboccio]

OK, the above referenced website takes the original link, then modifies it as shown below:

original:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_4BPchm8zw

after inserting a "-" after the "t" in youtube URL:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/b_4BPchm8zw?playlist=b_4BPchm8zw&autoplay=1&iv_load_policy=3&loop=1&start= 

Someone's got to be smart enough (apparently not me) to create a formula to do the same thing, without having to go to that website, no?

[don_b_nashville]

How about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0VMfrdbuMw 

[ddelboccio]

Interesting!!!!

[llennon]

Like this one too, ironically i had to watch an ad before seeing the video.

[ddunlap]

While ads seem inevitable, our folks are seeing actual pornography within the ads - started this past week.  A ticket has been opened with Google - there is finger-pointing between Google and YouTube but blocking  ih1.googleusercontent.com/proxy through 1h10.googleusercontent.com/proxy/ is being tried.

[sleeciambra]

We're having similar issues, not necessarily pornography but content that we feel uncomfortable with students seeing and that we can't remove via our former techniques. Inserting in a slide does not cut out the ads for us anymore, though maybe we're doing something wrong. When I use the yout-ube technique embedded in our LMS, it is a blank/black video embed, unless you embed it through a page in HTML mode which is bordering on too convoluted for our teachers. There used to be a _popup shortcut that worked, and I'm not having luck with that either. I'm testing out SafeShare but there is some content that can't be used within that product. As a result, we're cycling through multiple methods to restrict ads as much as possible, but it's becoming very time consumingfor everyone and has mixed results. 

[claduc62]

Hi, has anyone ever tried using pi-hole to solve the ad blocking problem?

[kaned]

We used that temporarily to fix another issue and provide insights into queries.  There are docker containers out there that can run on decent equipment..

It did require some modification of standard resources to get up and running reliably.  We did not use this specifically for this purpose though.

[Kim_Nilsson]

So far... the combination of methods we/I have implemented seem to work well enough.
(Discussed in earlier threads.)

I'm not getting overwhelmed with support calls about this, so either it works adequately, or teachers and students have found workable solutions without me. 🙂