YouTube is running an experiment asking some users to disable their ad blockers or pay for a premium subscription, or they will not be allowed to watch videos.
Honestly, I’ve always been surprised as to why YouTube even tolerates adblockers. It’s basically a no-brainer for them to bake ads into the stream and disable skipping
Because it’s impossible to block adblocking. The server can’t know whether the client plays the video. The best they could do is have you wait the ad-time even if the ad is blocked but that would just mess with their analytics - they want to be sure the ad is being watched.
The only reason adblock blocking works for smaller websites is because adblockers need to catch up with each implementation. People will easily catch up with Youtube as there are thousands of people working on Youtube programming.
I think the commenters intention was that YouTube could stream you the video with embedded ads. They would have to stream the content though and skipping ahead would have to be guarded serverside by some clever checks on if you received (and therefore likely seen) the section of the video with the ads.
What probably speaks against this is that it would significantly increase their costs, since they couldn’t cache as easily anymore and always need “clever” services/servers along the way. A dumb CDN wouldn’t cut it anymore.
I fear it’s still just a question of when it’s either cheap enough for Google to do it or when the expected returns are high enough to offset the increased costs.
Honestly, I’ve always been surprised as to why YouTube even tolerates adblockers. It’s basically a no-brainer for them to bake ads into the stream and disable skipping
Sponsorblock: allow us to introduce ourselves
If YouTube wanted to, they could disable that.
Because it’s impossible to block adblocking. The server can’t know whether the client plays the video. The best they could do is have you wait the ad-time even if the ad is blocked but that would just mess with their analytics - they want to be sure the ad is being watched.
The only reason adblock blocking works for smaller websites is because adblockers need to catch up with each implementation. People will easily catch up with Youtube as there are thousands of people working on Youtube programming.
I think the commenters intention was that YouTube could stream you the video with embedded ads. They would have to stream the content though and skipping ahead would have to be guarded serverside by some clever checks on if you received (and therefore likely seen) the section of the video with the ads.
What probably speaks against this is that it would significantly increase their costs, since they couldn’t cache as easily anymore and always need “clever” services/servers along the way. A dumb CDN wouldn’t cut it anymore.
I fear it’s still just a question of when it’s either cheap enough for Google to do it or when the expected returns are high enough to offset the increased costs.
Going to be interesting when people have access to AI video editors as well. “Oi, AI, show me the best bits from the news and remove the ads”
An eternal truth with delivering video content is that you can’t obfuscate the stream itself, because that’s what the content is.
Exactly.