And it's funny to me to watch people smugly use AdBlock. All you folks who use it understand that Google could detect that you AdBlocked, and then refuse to show the video, right? I mean, you get that, right?
I could write userland software to automatically skip ahead 30 seconds on any YouTube video.
Google could prevent people from skipping the first 30 seconds of any video by delaying the data stream for the remainder of the video at the server level.
At that point, I could go outside and watch the sunset.
Or, I could buy a frak-ton of EC2 instances and cobble together a crappy IsomorphTube--with discreet text-based ads, which might attract viewers simply because Google had turned YouTube into an armed camp (with forced video viewing for all).
Let's remember that even though Google has a huge scale advantage, it isn't Google that's creating the content on YouTube.
Emphasis on "could". They don't. So what?
It's trivial to make anti-anti-adblock filters, so most sites don't even start that arms race.
Google could announce, "Hey, everyone who has ad-blocked over the last year violated our Terms of Use, and so we're deleting their accounts."
Or they could just shut down YouTube, because it's impossible to earn revenue off of people who aren't even willing to watch an ad before they feel entitled to watch a video.
I have seen people put stickers on their monitors over where the ads are... How are they going to detect that?
I'm sure they feel it's much better to be able to tell when people are blocking ads (and therefore not charge for impressions), than it would be to try and force me to watch ads, when I've already demonstrated that I'm willing to do what it takes to block them.
5. But it's only "most", and it's more and more common to find videos where you get 30 seconds unskippable.