this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Honestly, I've always been surprised as to why YouTube even tolerates adblockers. It's basically a no-brainer for them to bake ads into the stream and disable skipping
Sponsorblock: allow us to introduce ourselves
If YouTube wanted to, they could disable that.
Because it's impossible to block adblocking. The server can't know whether the client plays the video. The best they could do is have you wait the ad-time even if the ad is blocked but that would just mess with their analytics - they want to be sure the ad is being watched.
The only reason adblock blocking works for smaller websites is because adblockers need to catch up with each implementation. People will easily catch up with Youtube as there are thousands of people working on Youtube programming.
I think the commenters intention was that YouTube could stream you the video with embedded ads. They would have to stream the content though and skipping ahead would have to be guarded serverside by some clever checks on if you received (and therefore likely seen) the section of the video with the ads.
What probably speaks against this is that it would significantly increase their costs, since they couldn't cache as easily anymore and always need "clever" services/servers along the way. A dumb CDN wouldn't cut it anymore.
I fear it's still just a question of when it's either cheap enough for Google to do it or when the expected returns are high enough to offset the increased costs.
Going to be interesting when people have access to AI video editors as well. “Oi, AI, show me the best bits from the news and remove the ads”
An eternal truth with delivering video content is that you can’t obfuscate the stream itself, because that’s what the content is.
Exactly.
The clever check is impossible. The server can't know the client is showing the video even when playing DRM content. I could literally mute the sound and put a black box over the ad until it's over. The problem is as old as the internet itself.
That's why Apple and Meta pushing eye tracking so hard. It's the only solution to the ad blocking problem.
I think YT is doing well with YT premium and that's the way to go for them. It's one of my favorite subscriptions and I'd probably stick around even if they raise the price unless they hurt the creators so badly they bounce and I'd bounce with them.
They also can't force you to look and listen to the current ads. So the "clever tracking" doesn't need to be better than the status quo. What it could avoid is completely skipping ads as if they are not there. The server could reject giving you further frames until the time the ad runs is over. If you suppressed the ad, you still had to sit it out. Which in turn means that it's (almost) futile for the user to do that. If I have to wait 2 minutes to watch, I might as well leave the ad running.
I would still guess people would rather block it and context switch for those 5-10 seconds or it could be preloaded for every video on the timeline which in turn just hurt Youtube's ad system. The reality is that adblock people are tech savy minority and it's not worth bending the whole ad pipeline out of shape just for that.
I guess we'll see how Google handles this but I don't think they can pull it off tbh.
> some clever checks on if you received (and therefore likely seen) the section of the video with the ads
Adblock would just evolve to politely answer "yes" when asked if the content had been received and played.
The server knows how long the ad was. It wouldn't ask the client, it would simply "wait".
That's a description of this:
> The best they could do is have you wait the ad-time even if the ad is blocked but that would just mess with their analytics - they want to be sure the ad is being watched.
I was more answering to the last part
You can't circumvent something clientside that is done on the server. When I grab a stream from Twitch, the first 10 seconds or so are always a "placeholder" image instead of the stream. There is nothing I can do while watching. I can of course remove it later, but not while watching.
I am not saying that Youtube has any chance of forcing you to watch ads. But there are technical means to prevent you from skipping ads as if they were never there. The question is simply when this becomes feasible to do. At the moment it's apparently not feasible. But this could change.