YouTube tests server-side ads to make your coveted blocker obsolete
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YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.
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Won't this totally break deep linking to time codes?
They can surely work around that... But if the client somehow knows where the ads are, the adblocker can skip them anyways.
But maybe also deep linking is less important than ads to them.
While the overall video would be a different length, video players often don't count the ads towards the media time. So the deep links should be okay
But isn't that because the ads aren't part of the video? If players can tell when it's an advert, presumably ad blockers could too.
(Although presumably they have to tell the player to disable video scrubbing)
I'm not entirely sure how ad blockers work, but my understanding was they prevent things loading from certain URLs. If the ads are embedded into the video, then there's no ad-specific URL to block