158
Youtube Adblock Reckoning as a service problem?
(startrek.website)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
158 points (95.9% liked)
Technology
59982 readers
2435 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
They'll lose...they already forgot why they beat out yahoo for search.
There's other platforms salivating at YouTube imploding.
No there isn’t
There hasn’t been a viable alternative to YouTube since the day it was released, and that’s no different today. No platform can handle to volume of data that google does. Google can barely handle that data and they own the datacenters.
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.
And people already figured out a way around this. They can only ever kick out adblock users temporarily, not permanently.
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.
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.
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).
If google wanted to and could do it they would have done it already.