YouTube will "lose" the war, but they'll make adblocking difficult enough for a while that it might get some premium subscribers in the short term in exchange for the loss of goodwill.
It boggles my mind that engineers and managers that have kids and are working on the YouTube team think this is okay and this is what the future of the platform should look like.
It's the beginning of the end of an era, and I'm immensely sad to see what the internet has become and where it is heading.
Or they stop going to YouTube. In the past 12mo my use of these platforms has reduced a huge amount. I no longer visit Twitter or Reddit because they blocked 3rd party apps, forcing me to view adverts, I would rather not be a user on a user hostile platform.
Deep down, most of us know these are huge time sinks providing very little real value to ours lives so it doesn’t take much friction added by the platform to make people turn away from their bad habits.
It's either a very depressing thing, or maybe an opportunity, depending on how rose colored your glasses are.
Is content from publishers you’ve subscribed to normally ad-free? I don’t understand the relationship between these things
Seems like slightly less of greasy activity now than it was then.
"Count eight" about halfway down the page: https://cip2.gmu.edu/2015/09/22/lets-get-real-about-kim-dotc...
Now, of course, we have community efforts like SponserBlock that could easily identify ad locations or some form of auto detection based on analyzing the video of they insert the ads at random locations in the video stream itself.
I'm certain this is coming. There's very little on YT I need to watch right now, and having a bunch of videos already downloaded and de-ad-ified would suffice. It would prevent the mindless watching anyway.
It's also kind of interesting to see people acting like it's entitled for people to be mad that the service that drove most other early competitors out by showing unsustainably low ads is now bait and switching by showing increasingly more ads. There's a reason there are more smaller competitors starting to pop up as YouTube has burned through leftover goodwill.
I use YouTube to search for videos on subjects I want to watch, but it seems that Google want YouTube to be like a TV channel where you just turn it on and watch what they show you.
Don't forget that Google also owns Chrome, which by its dominance over the market can be used to effectuate DRM (such as widevine, or web integrity). They also own the Chrome Web Store, and they can ban any extensions that bypass Youtube ads (they already ban extensions with the ability to download Youtube videos, strangely they allow downloaders for any other site).
Google has a lot of money, and a lot of fingers in critically important pies, to make their wishes a reality should they deem to do so.
Also keep in mind that pirate groups are able to crack L1 Widevine only because some companies let the keys slip in a breach. The keys are burned as soon as they are discovered, making it impractical to disseminate them for public use.
It's only because individual movies/tv shows have a high enough value (versus the cost of cracking it, the risk of your keys being burned) that pirate groups are able to thrive. This wouldn't work well with Youtube as it's value is primarily derived from having a large quantity of content.
I don't think many people would be willing to pay per Youtube video as they do for a movie.
Big tech can afford well paid security teams and uBlock Origin is a bunch of frustrated volunteers who are quitting now they're facing serious resistance for the first time. And Google haven't even exhausted 5% of their options.
This may be making some metric (account signups, presumably?) go up, but sure seems risky to me.
On YT, the people providing the value are the content creators. That is the same content creators who get a revenue share from ads and premium. They're the ones who benefit the most from blocking ad blockers. The people watching videos with ad blockers (and sponsor block)? They're not providing anything in exchange, to the platform or the creators.
b) YT is a propaganda engine, too. It serves that end to allow nearly-unlimited membership.
So don't watch things for free. Many people think that if a company is giving things for free you are not obligated to pay them in any way. The company can stop it if they can't afford anymore.
Ad-avoidance is hardly a new thing. And as ads have got increasingly obnoxious and untrustworthy, ad-avoidance technology has inevitably become more popular.
* don't waste infrastructure on freeloaders
* convince advertisers audience is seeing the ads they pay for
The content is free in the sense Google pays (close to) nothing and in the sense that creators can go to a different platform (as long as viewers come too).
Cost centers are data centers, bandwidth and labour maintaining the platform. Wrt. the latter, I would estimate the anti ad blocker stuff has significant costs, but isn't eating into the dev cycle in an existential way yet.
At some point they might be in trouble. Anyone have an idea when?
Brave Browser has been great so far...
Embedding the ads into the stream is pretty difficult.
But compute costs could drop, and change the equation.
It's a big number. They avoid it by having the browser doing the mixing. I can't see that changing.