https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gross-profit
Alphabet gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $42.688B, a 7.85% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2023 was $160.503B, a 1.7% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2022 was $156.633B, a 6.77% increase from 2021.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2021 was $146.698B, a 50.01% increase from 2020.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2020 was $97.795B, a 8.71% increase from 2019.
Huh, they seemingly have money to not fuck our eyes without lube for ads, but I guess they somehow just don’t have enough money, 156 billion dollars is really nothing after all. Probably more money in between my couch cushions. Such a small indie company that has to struggle to remain afloat, like an Etsy store.
BIG NUMBER MUST GO UP
MUST APPEASE THE GOD OF CAPITALISM AND THE ALMIGHTY SHAREHOLDERS!
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Of course they don’t have enough money
The goal is (as always) to have all the money
This phenomenon is normally created by a bunch of mid level people without many stock options trying to get promotions. They need the big arrow to go up to get a good raise, be recognized, etc in their individual business units.
The people pushing things to go up are typically not motivated by the gross number as much as they are making their boss happy enough to pay them more. That’s why the change is all that matters.
Yes but does YouTube it’s self make money? There isn’t a reason to run a section of your company if it costs you money.
I am not justifying 17 ads in a 10 minute video, but no company keeps a product that doesn’t make money
There isn’t a reason to run a section of your company if it costs you money.
It’s funny that you say this, because Google intentionally ran YouTube without making any profit from it for many years. The goal (which they succeeded in) was to starve out any competition and establish YouTube as the online video monopoly. Ever since establishing that monopoly, they’ve been squeezing more and more money out of the platform knowing that social inertia will work against any would-be competitors (everything is on YouTube, all of the content creators are on YouTube, all of the viewers are on YouTube, so how does someone convince enough people to move to another platform?).
That’s how they’re able to pull this anti-adblock nonsense, in fact. If they hadn’t killed off all competitors, everyone would just be going to them.
True but data collection is still done and generates $$$
Think about gmail & Google docs
That’s why they want to run more ads.
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Prominent example is printer hardware and the ink. Hardware is sold at little mark-up or at a loss and then they force you to use their iteration of liquid gold. Printer ink is dirt cheap to manufacture and costs more than human blood.
There are lots of reasons that one area of your company may make less money. It’s like how the NYC subway or post office technically don’t “make money” but the value they bring to the whole system is a net positive by enabling all the other companies to make way more.
Government ≠ Private/Publically shared company.
Google couldn’t care less about what it brings if it doesnt make more money than it takes.Data aquisition for analysis, AI training, tracking and simply having monopolized a space. Theres a lot of positives and indirect profit that might make it feasible.
But does it “Good” for the public like say road improvement?
It does “Good” for the company by increasing the quality of the output of it’s AI/LLM, more data to track users etc.You just confirmed what I said…
Alphabet
what does this mean? is it the stock market in general or google or is it tech co’s?
Fairly sure that Alphabet is google parent company
It’s Google’s parent company. Like meta to fb.
How do you think they make that money? I mean yes it is an insane amount and do they need that much but they would still have ads.
Just because a company is profitable it doesn’t mean they can’t ask users to pay for a service.
I don’t love Alphabet either, but in their shoes I’d block ad filters too. YouTube is spectacularly expensive to run.
Ok, I’m curious. Gonna do some math.
- YouTube makes $30B/yr in revenue.
- YouTube has 2.7B active users.
- This means that YouTube is making about $11.11/person/year.
- uBlockO has 10m active users.
- This means that uBlockO is costing YouTube $111m annually, or about 4% of their overall revenue.
I’ll admit, that number is bigger than I expected. But almost any other line item on their budget sheet would be bigger.
ETA: it’s worth noting that YouTube has estimated operating costs of $5B, so this isn’t coming anywhere near making them unprofitable.
Is that 10 million active users of uBlock Origin or 10 million active installs? Also relevant because I’ve seen workplaces that deploy UBO to all users thanks to advertising being an easy vector of getting users to click random links they shouldn’t
So I can’t find my original source for that one anymore, but I looked at the Chrome Web Store and addons.mozilla.org and they show a total of ≈17m (10mil on Chrome, 6.9mil on Firefox).
I don’t see a good active users number on uBlockO’s website or anything, and I also don’t have a good way of estimating how many of those installs are second or third browsers; but an enterprise install probably wouldn’t go through the extension storefronts and would instead be delivered directly via MDM. Whether that means they’d count toward the browsers’ totals, I’m not sure.
Still, it seems to me that the vagaries around this probably cancel each other out decently well; sure, some might be double-counted or enterprise installs, but the actual uBlockO users are probably more inclined to be power users, online more often than other users. I’d say that 4% is probably in the ballpark at least. Maybe it’s 1%, maybe it’s 6%, but I don’t think it’s terribly far off.
I could tolerate ONE ad per video, at the beginning, but 3 or 4 ads in a less than ten minute video? Fuck that.
You see YouTube is a American company and in America every thing is extreme you ether have a lot of ads or no ads you can have a extremely massive car or a cat that’s soo small it doesn’t exist
But… But… What If I want a large cat and a tiny car?
I want my leopard riding shotgun in my smart car.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I want to get a joint account with my mother fuckin’ Jaguar
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
my leopard riding shotgun in my smart car.
That’s some ‘Talladega Nights: Tokyo Edition’ vibe you got going there and I approve!
I could only tolerate ElectroBoom-style “This video is sponsored by oscilloscope company” ads.
Don’t forget the gold confetti
That’s the thing.
You’re already proud to lower your standards, why not lower them further?
I really care about your opinion. It’s very important to me.
Something tells me you only care about ideas that don’t criticize you.
Buh bye.
Hey man, it’s your time and money.
Spend it how you want to.
The whole reason is to either make it so annoying that you switch to their paid service or get as many ad dollars into the shortest amount of time possible either way. This is just greed to squeeze as much out of the consumer before they break us.
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Don’t the content creators choose where to place ads?
I have no idea.
Straight up what made me switch to YouTube premium was a bit of a 2 pronged thing really
They started including Google Play Music with it, and then I got an unskippable 1 hour ad in front of a video that after I reloaded the page I got the same ad again.
Edit: I don’t have an issue paying for a service if the price is right. I got what I wanted for I price I’m willing to pay.
So basically you let them bully you into giving them money lol
Basically I saw it as “I already pay for Spotify, I might as well get rid of ads consistently and get music streaming for the same cost.”
I still think Google Play Music was better than YouTube Music currently is though.
Edit: Thinking back on it it was called YouTube Red when I signed up, it’s been a long time.
They bundle YT Music in your subscription because they wanted a share in music streaming, invested in an infrastructure on their platform and then realized that their service doesn’t offer enough to make people want to use it over their competitors’ music streaming services. Instead of taking that loss or making their service worth using, they bundle the shit nobody wants with what everyone needs and use that to justify a price hike.
If there was a basic subscription that just removes ads on the videos I click on without any other useless crap attached to it, I would pay for that. But no, it’s predatory, anti-consumer bullshit, so I just block their ads.
Everything you just said, all of it, makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
Which part doesn’t make sense?
This entire shitty ad model these companies have pushed onto the net needs to go. Seriously. Find a better way to monetize your world.
It’s not even just the Internet. Marketing fucks up every aspect of our civilization. We can’t even handle having a professional election anymore without trashy ads and people acting like children. You can’t even watch legitimate news anymore. …nevermind mind whack kids pranking people on YouTube being used and turning into assholes for YouTube monetization.
Honestly I’m starting to wonder if the reason why we got ourselves into a ad filled hell hole is because we expect soo much to be free and those things have to make money somehow and server space and the electricity they run on aren’t free and the only people willing to spend money are whales and advertisers and from what I’ve been told YouTube was never profitable on it’s own for Google and the only reason they’ve been keeping the site on is because it brings attention to other Google services while also preventing competition so I greatly think we’d all benefit from being open to paying for sites that are like YouTube so YouTube and advertisers have some real competitors I don’t know how a my theoreticall site would profit without ads but it’s still sad that sites like YouTube are expensive and unprofitable making it so Google is the only option solely because they can afford the loses making yt premium even more greedy
IF you want to get down the rabbit hole of expectations. I lose 34% off my pay. Like that. Poof. Taxes. I lose another 50% of what’s left to rent and groceries (not eating out). That doesn’t cover internet or utilities. Then transportation. And that’s just essentially living. My place isn’t all that.
And now you want me to pay for every website I visit. Or every service I use? Or I don’t use them and just go back to “essentially being alive.”
And I’m in the top 20% of income earners according to recent stats, which is insane because I’m not making fuck you money.
I think the real issue is greed. There’s no need for Disney+ to cost $20 a month. There’s no need for me to pony up another $1.5 a month to get 50GB of storage instead of the 5GB they know you’ll outgrow in a week. There’s zero need to pay $18 a month for a blue checkmark. They tell you it’s because it costs lots and lots of money to operate and the ads just barely cover our costs. Sure.
It’s just greed. It’s all just amoral, unethical, greed. Right on up from the rent/mortgage to all the shit you buy or “consume.”
We saw this surge with COVID, GME, crypto, NFT, absolutely wild, insidious, and morally bankrupt schemes exposing just how much wealth is pooled away from working class (they actually call them ‘dark pools’, where money goes and disappears). Something clicked. And it became a feeding frenzy where everyone is just steadily driving up prices, but not a single company is unprofitable. All the lay offs? None of those tech companies were in trouble. In fact, most made record profits!
No, because they add advertisements to services you pay for.
See: television, streaming services, fucking books even.
It’s just unregulated capitalism doing what unregulated capitalism does - gobble up as much revenue as possible, at the expense of everything else.
This answer confuses me. The message on that pop up is “buy YouTube premium, so you won’t be stuck in our ad supported model” and now we’re ranting that they need to find another model to finance themselves? Isn’t YouTube premium exactly that?
Paying to remove ads is part of the ad business model. Upset your customer enough until they give you money to make it stop. Once you pay to remove the ads you have rewarded them for implementing ads which lets them know that implementing ads was a great way at making money.
So YouTube premium is not another model. It is the same model. Another model is paying for a service that never had ads at all such as NebulaTV or CuriosityStream.
So “pay or you don’t get shit” is okay, but “pay or see ads, your choice” is bad somehow?
Somehow? Paying to remove ads is rewarding ads thus causing more ads in the world. It’s not mysterious at all.
There are plenty of ways to not make it an all or nothing service, but that is at least the most straight forward. You could potentially give some of it away and then have to pay for the rest. Or have some stuff for free and more premium content is paid for. Or perhaps based on bandwidth with video quality / resolution.
Anything that is not ads is going to be an improvement.
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It’s not pay or remove ads. It is pay to give us the money that we need to run our business or we will use ads to get that much money
You’re right, but premium is too expensive. They make a pittance per ad view, but expect a user to pay $14/m to get rid of them? The math doesn’t math.
They simultaneously introduced this ad blocker change and took away the $5 no-ads package.
This is a shakedown and it’s been happening across many streaming platforms for a while now.
I don’t mind ads as a concept. The issue is how invasive and numerous they’ve become. Get back to the days when ads were just banners around the actual content or an easily skippable video that plays before what I’m trying to watch and I’ll happily disable my ad blocker for you. Unfortunately hardly anyone does that anymore because they view it as a missed opportunity to make even more money.
I’m not against using ads to support websites but it’s the same basic concept as piracy. If you make the experience of playing by the rules so unbearable that it seems easier to go out of my way to break them then I probably will.
What everyone else said but also they still collect and do whatever they want with your data even if you pay them. They purposely made everything more shitty and then charged to put it back to how it was originally. Also, they stayed free as long as they did to kill off the competition and it clearly worked. I just can’t ever justify giving them money. Especially with the double dip on my data.
But no, not like that. Clearly they need to find a way of materializing money from thin air.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gross-profit
Alphabet gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $42.688B, a 7.85% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2023 was $160.503B, a 1.7% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2022 was $156.633B, a 6.77% increase from 2021.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2021 was $146.698B, a 50.01% increase from 2020.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2020 was $97.795B, a 8.71% increase from 2019.
“Guys they don’t have any money, they just gotta be privacy vampires and spam us with ads, they have no other means of funding it!”
Maybe stop being a bootlicker for a company that used to be “Don’t be evil.”
Yeah! There needs to be a model that does neither cost nor inconveniences me. Everything else is unacceptable and corporate BS!
I’m sure they can take a page from every online service before we entered the 2020s, where you could pay to enter without ads, like Netflix was. But no, the ad company has to inject ads into everything.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gross-profit
Alphabet gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $42.688B, a 7.85% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2023 was $160.503B, a 1.7% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2022 was $156.633B, a 6.77% increase from 2021.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2021 was $146.698B, a 50.01% increase from 2020.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2020 was $97.795B, a 8.71% increase from 2019.
“Guys they don’t have any money, they just gotta be privacy vampires and spam us with ads, they have no other means of funding it!”
Like charging a fee?
Make it possible to get Premium without YT music bolted on it.
Believe it or not Google: Some users don’t want it or already have a platform.I’ve been around since YT red, and while Google Play Music was a better app, I am OK with YT music and primarily watch YT over the other sites and yt music is all I listen to in the house or car. So, while not cheap $22/mo for premium family fits my needs.
I’d be OK if yt allowed me to skip/blocked sponsored ads too. At least on PC sponsor block works well. For my TV its a few more hoops to get that there, which I haven’t done. Not terrible to ffw across them
I’m not paying them a penny either way, but if you’re going to, wouldn’t you want more features for your money, even if you don’t use them? Or are you suggesting they charge less for a subscription sans music?
Less money and remove music
Aka Youtube Lite Edition.The bomb is, that Youtube wants for Lite Edition money and still serves “limited” ads.
lmao.
They bundle them together because they want people to buy more. This is why the ad-free only tier disappears and it all costs more.
I think about this Jaron Lanier talk a lot.
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Yeah. Nah.
I shouldn’t have to watch any ads on an already-profitable product. Accepting less is just me lowering my standards so people richer than me can be even richer.
It’s more than that. Would you devote 1-5% of your PC resources to others while you watch a video, if you could watch a video without ads? Yes. I bet so.
We are able to easily shoulder the burdens of hosting, yet Google wants to dominate us and force us to use their hosting at the psychological cost of being their sponge for anyone’s paid information campaign. YouTube in 2016 was non-stop Trump ads. Non fucking stop.
FUCK Google.
I totally agree. We need more peer-supported services.
No no we are not. How are we going to distribute all the videos. I don’t think you realize how much storage youtube takes up. Could we have something yes would it be as big and vast as youtube not even close. I mean we can’t even distribute a handful of reddits traffic without failing.
Storage is probably the easier aspect to address. Storage is cheap and decentralized storage systems have existed for decades.
The problem is bandwidth and latency. Most residential ISPs do not offer high bandwidth and low latency upstream connections, which means there’s no good way to serve the content you’re storing.
Residential fiber is becoming more common in some areas, but often those residential plans still limit upstream or specifically have terms in their acceptable use policy that forbid such activities. Here’s an example from my fiber provider, which couldn’t be clearer:
You may not use the Services to host any type of server.
It’s a little silly of course, because if you were playing a game and hosting, you’re probably hosting a server! But if I were serving videos to thousands of peers, I’m sure they would notice and take issue.
How dare you try to bridle unbridled capitalism
Huh that doesn’t make anysense? Youtube is profitable because of ads. It’s not like it has a secrete revenue source and the ads are just gravy on top.
They are profitable because they data mine the shit out of you. And now they want you to pay them so they can continue doing it.
Huh that doesn’t make anysense?
I mean, if you use your brain it makes perfect sense.
I don’t watch ads. Youtube is profitable. I shouldn’t have to watch ads on an already-profitable product.
Accepting less is just me lowering my standards so people richer than me can be even richer.
Might wanna brush up on that reading comprehension, lol.
They’re going to randomize all vars and function names, mark my words.
Yup. Ad blockers work on pattern matching rules. Countering them might take some work but it’s not impossible - make the URLs that do the bad shit indistinguishable from the ones that make the video works and likewise html elements. Randomise everything, make the paths to things unpredictable. I’m sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable.
“I’m sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable.”
Who is going to tell him?
aren’t they already? It’s been some time since I worked in video. but I remember HLS manifest had ad insertion built-in.
Last part is already done. Ads are delivered by the same DNS as the video, which is why DNS-based blocking methods like Pihole don’t work for YouTube video ads.
If you meant that Google will re-encode every video on their platform and insert ads like the sponsor segments, that’s not feasible. Ads ads served on a bidding basis and the advertiser who pays most, gets their ad delivered. That would be Impossible unless you keep multiple copies of the video with different ad segments.
You don’t need to re-encode the video. Look up HLS segments, which is the standard for streaming video and I assume YouTube uses it.
Each video is split into many segments, like 10 seconds long (though the duration doesn’t matter). The browser first fetches a “playlist” which is just a list of these segments. Then the video player plays each segment in order. So Google could just insert ad-segments into the video stream, and if they did it cleverly, there would be no way to determine that they were ads.
They are legally obligated to show which part of the video is an ad (and contractually obligated to have a clickable link), which always leaves ad blockers a way to correlate and remove those segments though (essentially skipping forward during the ad, then lying to the backend when asking for additional segments as if the user had skipped through the video after the ad was over).
On Twitch they managed to outplay even uBlock, because the streaming is realtime and if you skip the ad segments, there’s no data to fall back to and the backend won’t send you the regular segments until the ad break is over (from what I understand). So at best you get a waiting screen instead of an ad.
However I’m not sure if it would make (financial) sense to apply a similar strategy on YouTube, as that would require preventing buffering the video until the ads have stopped playing (and wouldn’t work at all for midroll ads since the video has already been buffered at that point). Not only would this be expensive to do in the backend, but it would likely cause disproportionate buffering on low-end connections which couldn’t start loading the video while the ad is playing.
On Twitch they managed to outplay even uBlock, because the streaming is realtime and if you skip the ad segments, there’s no data to fall back to and the backend won’t send you the regular segments until the ad break is over (from what I understand). So at best you get a waiting screen instead of an ad.
Yes, you get a “commercial break in progress” banner, but it’s not loading ads when watching through HLS.
Ads on Twitch are not nearly as bad as on YouTube tho, so I actually have an exception for Twitch ads. I usually only watch esports tournaments and they make sure there are no ad breaks during games, just between segments. And on the rare occasion that I watch a regular stream, I get an ad or two maybe once every 45 minutes, which is fair.
The ads are really annoying if you streamhop frequently, because almost every time you switch stream you have to wait 30s-1m.
I pay for Turbo now so that’s fine, but the way it’s implemented seems really stupid to me, if you are looking for a stream to watch you sometimes get ad after ad after ad which can’t possibly be good for viewer retention.
Pre-roll ads are stupid, yeah. At least give me some time to figure out if I want to watch the stream… But that a thing that’s also worse on YT since they removed dislike count. Is it another clickbaity jump-cut-ridden garbage video or is it actually information? Roll the dice to find out!
If the browser itself could check those fragments though… 🤔
Yeah they are sooner or later going to do something like this. But then we can download videos and use Ai to remove the ads.
Will probably pop up YouTube proxys that does this on request so we don’t even have to download.
it will be an interesting cat and mouse game or people will start to shift to another video sharing platform
Of course they are, for example when targeting HTML elements you generally need to target text not vars or function names.
At the end there will always be some way since to the user the text should be similar or the UI should be similar… So there will be always a way… But yeah it can get more complex.
The only exception is the case they implement the web integrity thing at browser level or equivalent.
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The point being that if one can find the domain through which they push said script/the script itself, they can disable it (I use NoScript).
How long until youtube add an anti-anti-anti-adblocker?
Who blocks the blocker?
Like a fuzzbuster. Radar detector detector detector
I miss 3 days ago when the blockade was just some HTML
Let the cat and mouse games begin!!! Thanks for the heads up though
Anytime you all want to go back to making your own websites
Anytime
It’s pretty difficult nowadays to self-host websites when everyone and their nanny shares a single public IP address (IPv4 address exhaustion is real, everyone!) unless you purchase a hosting service.
DDNS
Before social media back in the 2000’s i know quite a few personal site using home servers using them. And (google google) apparently these days cloudflare offers the service.
No, you misunderstand. You’re thinking of DHCP. The parent poster is talking about CGNAT, where hundreds or thousands of customers of an ISP may share the same public-facing IPv4 address. It’s impossible to self-host anything in this scenario, there no way around it and DDNS won’t help you.
DDNS won’t save you from your ISP sticking your modem behind a cgnat and blocking critical ports. Which is not an uncommon scenario at all.
There are ways around it, but it’s still not very straightforward. Also often with some significant limitations.
Then purchase a hosting service. Off-shore VPSes are pretty cheap, and they take Bitcoin. Even fucking Paypal uses Bitcoin nowadays. Only hurdle in your way is you.
That’s pretty much just pushing the centralization from Google, AWS etc to the hosting services.
Then start building community ISPs that allow for individuals to have their own IPs again.
If you want to solve the problem, you have work to do.
Or you can sit around and complain like you’re trying to justify and defend doing, and live without access to ad free quality videos. Your choice.
Good luck getting a block of IP addresses from your regional internet registry for this community ISP… IP address exhaustion is just that, no more addresses. That’s why we are sharing them.
We do have a solution and it’s called IPv6, but its deployment is still not as widespread as people would like to be. If I self-host my website on IPv6, a lot of people from Europe would still be unable to access it.
Then start convincing people to use it.
The only one who is going to be hurt by you constantly making excuses is you. No matter what hurdles you face, you have to overcome them, even if you have to build your own separate network from scratch, or you’ll never be free from the yoke of corporations and more importantly for you, you’ll never be free of the blame.
Tell me you haven’t seen people adamantly defending IPv4 without telling me so…
Semi-related: what’s a good frontend for android TV? I’m loving NewPipe on my phone, but on the TV it refuses to work in full screen and often in not-full screen too…
SmartTubeNext is your best bet, I think Libretube devs will be working on landscape support too sometime, but that’s probably very far away
Thanks, it’s working great so far! 🫶
Glad you’re liking it!
Maybe Kodi works? It does on the FireTV Stick, as long as you can install apps from play store, you’re good.
Is the any way to add something like this to my pihole to block all this shit network wide?
Pihole, if i understand correctly, works by blocking DNS requests and YouTube ads are not DNS based the way ads usually are. You’re stuck blocking them by uBO on each device or use Invidious.
I just spun up my own invidious instance on docker today. I’m so mad that I haven’t done this sooner!
I’ve run pihole for years. It works really well. The only problem I’ve seen is when you actually need a tracking URL to work. For example clicking a link in your emails to download a ticket for a concert. You just need to be mindful that when the browser fails to open a link it’s because of the PiHole. There’s no nice screen telling you. You just need to pop it into the whitelist to allow it although on a phone I just used to go to mobile data temporarily, click the link and then go back on WiFi.
I recently switched to using NextDNS, as it means all my DNS queries are encrypted and I still get filtering when I’m away from home. I also have three kids to manage so it allows me to set timers on their devices to block certain traffic. Good for blocking adult sites too.
Unfortunate, no.
I had this code saved and had suggested it to others before but now I didn’t take my own advice and had been struggling with those pop-ups for the past few days. I hope this solves it.
EDIT: Doesn’t work. Still got the popup despite having all other extensions disabled and uBlock on default settings
Get your FreeTube subs set up and ready to go. https://freetubeapp.io/
Rad! Thank you!
