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There is no balancing happening here. YouTube needs to make an API call to attribute a view to a video, and easylist started blocking that API call. YouTube was perfectly happy a month ago to count views for users that were blocking ads, and presumably remains happy to do so.

The only thing that changed is easylist blocked the API.

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The do not need an API call, obviously they know that the video is being watched, because it's being streamed.

YouTube serves videos from CDNs, many of which it does not own.

I missed the part where that's our problem.

Metrics from the CDN will be wildly inaccurate. Also downloading a video isn’t the same as watching it.

> The only thing that changed is easylist blocked the API.

Wonder if there's a good reason they started blocking that API?

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