YouTube is waging a war against adblockers...and losing.
  • YouTube is intensifying efforts to combat adblockers, including blocking video playback and warning users of potential account suspension.
  • Increased ads on YouTube have driven many users to adblockers, hurting both YouTube’s ad revenue and content creators reliant on ad-based income.
  • Despite these measures, many users are leaving YouTube or finding workarounds, leading creators to seek alternative revenue streams off-platform.
  • @[email protected]English
    3•3 months ago

    You may be right, but I can’t imagine how they’d actually pull it off. The internet as a medium just doesn’t work that way - there’s always going to be a flag or a call for me to go pull ad data from somewhere else, and someone somewhere will write code that ignores that command.

    Great for them if they figure it out, but the medium doesn’t work in their favor. They want the frog to be an elephant, and when it proves to be a poor elephant they cry to the govt. to fix it with laws and dmca takedowns and whatnot. That’s just a waste of taxpayer money, and annoys people on the medium.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•3 months ago

      Just the way I described, I’m a software developer, it would be easy as hell.

      Your browser requests the video, YouTube decides you have to watch an ad. The ad has 15 seconds unskipable. So the easiest thing they could do is not send you video data for 14 seconds (add a spare second for buffering to not piss off users who do watch ads).

      Doesn’t matter if you call some endpoint, load the ad data, whatever. You’re not receiving any video for a while, which would piss people off enough to leave.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•3 months ago

        But you’re describing something like a hard paywall. I have to do a thing BEFORE they publish the video. Fair game. Weird that they don’t do that, but then bitch about me using an ad blocker.

        I think we’ve reached the point of “violently agreeing”. :)

        Good chat.

        I think if companies put effort into reasonable amounts of ads, and tried hard at keeping the malware in check - people would be more willing to let the ads through and let them make money. If they make money, I get content - win win.