this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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This is an arms race YouTube cannot win
They can win by making videos only accessible via account and aggressively banning adblock users. It will hurt it at first but people would rather accept it instead of finding a replacement. I expect this to happen in a few years.
Nothing can beat a VCR with an ad skipper.
And I am not afraid to use it.
They can just embed the ads in the actual video, server side.
Sponsorblock would still work, wouldn't?
Yeah. Which is pretty much undefeatable unless they get rid of the ability to skip sections of a video entirely and I don't think there'll be wanting to do that. Sponsor block doesn't exactly block things, it just skips sections of a video that the community has submitted it's not quite the same thing.
Those sections might be intro animations, that bit where they go "hey guys my name is XYZ YouTuber smash that like button and don't forget to subscribe comment and ring that bell!" etc
Ads can be randomly placed so there is no specific timestamp to skip.
This would obviously be very costly for Google, which is likely why they haven’t done it yet, but ultimately an ad blocker wouldn’t be able to block those.
Don't give them any ideas, a'right? But yeah. That's true. We could skip those identifying per frame/time, but adblocking would need more resources.
Well, if googles web integrity api becomes reality, every site that makes money from ads will refuse to serve any modified client.
I thought they backed out of that a couple weeks ago already
For now
It doesn't really matter they can't implement it if the other browsers aren't on board.
So they haven't so much backed out as much as they've been forced to give up with the idea because no one else wants to do it. Because why would you, it only benefits YouTube?
You are underestimating companies. Twitch won this race. YouTube can win too.
Twitch has the unique use case of live streaming, which makes the content’s timeliness a factor in the users experience.
How did twitch win? Would you not say that YouTube has a larger user base, and therefore a larger target of this sort of cracking?