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Why are ads on youtube not being blocked?!

JesseB.

Hi.

So, I've been struggling for a while trying to completely and utterly block ads from ever loading in Youtube videos. It seems like, no matter what I do, no matter what I block in UTM, nothing works. And this is very frustrating and is really beginning to piss me off.

 

HTTPS Filtering is turned on.

I've tried many different methods, I've blocked several application categories, different domains, urls and other stuff. I've even blocked QUIC completely.

But nothing is working. Ads are still getting through on YouTube. And I'm about fed-up with this.

If anyone has any suggestions, or anything that works PLEASE TELL ME! I do NOT want to block youtube completely.

 

App Control : 

Custom Filter Action : 

Website Filtering # 1 : 

Website Filtering # 2 : 

Website Filtering # 3 : 

Website Filtering # 4 : 

Firewall Rule on QUIC

 

These are just some of the troublesome URLs that seem to get through, despite everything I've put in place.

www.youtube.com/.../ads
www.youtube-nocookie.com/gen_204
www.youtube.com/.../
www.youtube.com/annotations_invideo
www.youtube.com/.../adview



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  • 0

    Hi Jessieb,

    Check out the link below:

    https://community.sophos.com/products/unified-threat-management/f/web-protection-web-filtering-application-visibility-control/46207/speeding-up-webbrowsing-by-blocking-advertisers-and-trackers

    We only went as far as steps 1 & 2. However, the result was that we now get very few (if any) ads at the start of any YouTube videos.

    Hope this helps,

    JP

  • +2 in reply to isoffice

    Did all that initially when I setup the UTM. YouTube ads still got through. 

    Today, I finally decided to spend time actually looking into this and figuring out why ads were still not being blocked. It looks like Google cleverly integrated them into Youtube as normal videos, only, including a specific query in the URL which classifies it as a specific type of ad or ad-video.

    I've compiled a RegEx that works wonderfully and actually filters out YouTube ads while allowing normal non-ad videos to play just fine.

     

    (([A-Za-z0-9.-\/]+)?)pageid\=[0-9]{1,30}

     

    I've spent the last hour and a half making sure it works and videos work normally, while ads remain blocked. And sure enough, even VEVO videos shut out ads. :)

    Here's an example URL I got this from, if you're interested : 

    [code]https://www.youtube.com/get_video_metadata?video_id=ufkgkH7O4QA&html5=1&page_subscribe=0&authuser=0&pageid=108398601314690181974[/code]

  • 0 in reply to JesseB.

    Do you mind sharing where and how you setup this regex in Sophos?

    I've noticed that Sophos has become pretty useless at blocking nearly any ads so I've resorted to setting up and using Pi-Hole instead. So far, that is working like a charm but the YouTube ad blocking isn't really working well in Pi-Hole. Would love to implement this to close the gap on blocking as many ads as I can.

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  • 0 in reply to JesseB.

    Do you mind sharing where and how you setup this regex in Sophos?

    I've noticed that Sophos has become pretty useless at blocking nearly any ads so I've resorted to setting up and using Pi-Hole instead. So far, that is working like a charm but the YouTube ad blocking isn't really working well in Pi-Hole. Would love to implement this to close the gap on blocking as many ads as I can.

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