this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 54 points 2 years ago (4 children)

This is an arms race YouTube cannot win

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

They can win by making videos only accessible via account and aggressively banning adblock users. It will hurt it at first but people would rather accept it instead of finding a replacement. I expect this to happen in a few years.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Nothing can beat a VCR with an ad skipper.

And I am not afraid to use it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They can just embed the ads in the actual video, server side.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Sponsorblock would still work, wouldn't?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ads can be randomly placed so there is no specific timestamp to skip.

This would obviously be very costly for Google, which is likely why they haven’t done it yet, but ultimately an ad blocker wouldn’t be able to block those.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Don't give them any ideas, a'right? But yeah. That's true. We could skip those identifying per frame/time, but adblocking would need more resources.

[–] xePBMg9 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Well, if googles web integrity api becomes reality, every site that makes money from ads will refuse to serve any modified client.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I thought they backed out of that a couple weeks ago already

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

You are underestimating companies. Twitch won this race. YouTube can win too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

How did twitch win? Would you not say that YouTube has a larger user base, and therefore a larger target of this sort of cracking?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Twitch has the unique use case of live streaming, which makes the content’s timeliness a factor in the users experience.