The 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers
The 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers
YouTube's dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there's an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
I believe that YouTube (and its suzerains Google and Alphabet) will lose this war.
Advertisers and platforms employing advertisement fall for the tragedy of the commons, where the common resource is the collective attention of the users. If you don't abuse that attention - by adding yet another ad space, and making your ads slightly more obnoxious and data-invasive - you're simply outcompeted and get no money.
This has reached such a point that even your granny is pissed. She might not know what's adsense, but she knows that she clicked a knitting video and got a muppet screaming "ACME CONDOMS~" in its place.
And for some, the reaction against being bossed around on what you should buy is so guttural that they'll go out of their way to learn to code, create and maintain ad blockers, and circumvent any shitty anti-ad blocker crap that you might throw at them. For free.
Every time that YT makes its ads a bit more obnoxious, YT gives a small edge to any competitor that may arise saying "we don't force ads down your throat". Eventually that edge will be enough to compensate for the network effect. Perhaps not for youtubers who rely on adsense, but certainly for hobbyists ("I make videos for fun") and people with different sources of income (like selling books/shirts/whatever).
Messing with Chrome to prevent ad blockers won't help Youtube/Google/Alphabet Inc. much either, unless you're literally unable to switch browsers. Tech illiterate might not know how to install a new browser, but they know how to ask for help to "get rid of the ads".
I don't disagree with your basic premise, but do want to point out big tech is using very detailed algorithmic profiles of users and even businesses to walk a fine line between exploitative profit and potential loss, now that we are in the enshittification phase: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification
It is using advanced techniques for profiling, but profiling is pointless if people don't see ads. And what's I think that is happening - people are avoiding advertisement like a plague, more than they did before.
now that we are in the enshittification phase
Yup. More specifically, the first step behind enshittification:
- 0 - the platform is good for the users
- 1 - the platform is bad for the users, good for corporate customers
- 2 - the platform is bad for corporate customers, as it claws back profit for itself
- 3 - the platform dies