Youtube Adblock Reckoning as a service problem?

xyguy@startrek.website to Technology@lemmy.world – 157 points –

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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The sponsorskip extension already has the functionality to get around something like this.

Yeah but that's because the content creator cannot dynamically change the time at which the sponsored part is. For ads, Google could dynamically insert ads at every 1/3rd of videos with a variation +- 1mn, and there's nothing an extension like sponsorblock could do without triming on the original video's content.

A solution to that would just be to save a snapshot of a video frame every second or so, then skip segments that don't match.