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If you can't beat them, join them? Make ads less annoying and the argument for an adblocker kind of goes down, less people begin using adblockers and more people see ads eventually. I guess that's a win win.

Scary that a company which operates off ad revenue can now control the ad revenue of other companies. How will they be accountable/transparent for scenarios like that?

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It seems already biased, as the forced ads in front of YouTube videos aren't substantially different from initial popups that block text content. Both force the end user to view an ad before the content. That one is HTML blocking HTML and the other is video blocking video seems unimportant to me.

Good point. If the ad is integrated into the player, it does not seem to bother Google and Google won't treat it as a pop-up. They are using a very narrow definition to score points. I hope people figure this out.

I hadn't thought of that. Obtrusive ads are bad unless they are our obtrusive ads.

I also want to understand what % of ads they'll be blocking are from competitor ad platforms and what % are self impacting vs the same for ads they don't block. Will this effectively devalue their competitors in a significant way?

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