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Youtube Adblock Reckoning as a service problem? (startrek.website)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by xyguy@startrek.website to c/technology@lemmy.world

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At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking. Either by hook or by crook those that want to use Adblockers are going to keep doing it no matter what.

And to be clear, I am not trying to equate Adblocking to video piracy. To me, the fact that I choose to go to the bathroom during a commercial of a tv show doesn't constitute piracy and Adblocks just automate that process for me on Youtube. I would also never click on an ad purposefully, no matter what it is for.

With all that being said, I am a hopeless cause and I don't think that anything will convince me to buy YouTube premium, but I also used to think that about MP3s.

My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil's advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the "service problem" of "YouTube piracy"? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?

This is an old article but this is Gabe Newell describing video game piracy as a service problem and why he believes that in case anyone is unfamiliar with it.

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[–] Vlyn@lemmy.zip -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What I meant is that they have the technical capability to lock you out when using an adblocker. They already do in a few countries (you can watch 3 videos then get kicked out). It's not a technical issue for YouTube.

There's not a single decent platform out there to replace YouTube. Even Vimeo is tiny and can barely keep up with demand.

And why should someone sink a massive amount of money into infrastructure without a way to make profit? If you try to monetize it from the start you'll never build a large enough userbase.

[–] Laticauda@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They already do in a few countries (you can watch 3 videos then get kicked out)

And people already figured out a way around this. They can only ever kick out adblock users temporarily, not permanently.

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.zip -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They absolutely can, it's not that difficult. The only thing they can't really avoid is video sharing (like a download site where you can re-host the videos), besides throwing lawyers at them.

But to block you watching on youtube.com? Easy as fuck.

[–] Laticauda@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Historically has never been "easy as fuck". this isn't their first attempt at stopping ad blockers. They can manage to do it temporarily, but ad blockers always figure out a way to get past any blocks put in place. We've seen this play out on the internet many many times in the past. Ad blockers have always won.

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.zip -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Of course it's easy as fuck. YouTube knows when it's serving you an ad. They know the ad is x seconds long minimum. So if they really wanted to they could just stop giving you video data for that time and you have to sit there twiddling your thumbs.

A more elegant solution would be to block the video transmission until the browser returns a secret (which it only gets at the end of the ad break), no way to get around that.

If ads are not served every single time you could still get around it by opening up several connections so you can buffer around the ad breaks.. but that's a hassle and you can't use this with an account (so no age restricted videos). And at some point YouTube might force you to make an account to watch.

If Google wanted to they could do it. Then in the absolute best case you'd have to sit there and watch a black screen for 5 seconds (you still load the ad, you just don't display it).

[–] Laticauda@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

If google wanted to and could do it they would have done it already.