Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers
Inside 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.
From the article: “In some ways, the current situation has spurred an arms race. YouTube has inadvertently improved ad blockers, as the new knowledge and techniques gained from innovating within the YouTube platform are also applicable to other ad and tracking systems.”
May the best product win (being AdBlockers ofc, lol)
Usually the product with the most money behind it wins, unfortunately.
I wish more publishers and creators could move away from YouTube, and stop relying (indirectly) on YouTube's targeted ads.
There's no silver bullet today, but a mix of alternative platforms (PeerTube, Nebula, Patreon...) and different way to get a revenue (subscription, donations, sponsors and non-targetted ad segments). I believe no alternative solution is feature-complete yet. Hopefully viewers will put some resources on alternatives, not just on AdBlock technologies, and follow creators who move away from YouTube.
The problem is that YouTube will always offer the best terms for initial creators. Hosting is free, the platform will sometimes help advertise you to your likely audience, and it may offer the first way to monetize the channel. A federated system isn't going to provide nearly the same benefits.
YouTube does have the advantage of scale, I wouldn't expect a federated solution to match their condition, but I'm hoping it can become good-enought as an alternative.
PeerTube isn't going to provide a solution, they explicitly state this in their FAQ. But there's no reason why other platform couldn't handle monetization AND federate through AgtivityPub (or its successor). If Nebula or Patreon wanted, they could join the federation and make some videos accessible this way. The one holdout would be video that are only accessible to paid subscribers, they wouldn't make them freely accessible via a federation.
From the PeerTube FAQ:
the uploader can display a support button under the video [..]
We did not go any further, as we refuse to tie our code to a particular content funding method, that might not fit all communities and deter others. It's the reason why we encourage developers to use the PeerTube plugin API to create their own monetization system.
It's interesting that no one is bringing up Vimeo in these discussions but I remember a thing a few years back where they disabled features that would make them a YouTube alternative (private links that you could share with your Patreons only or smth?) and when ask about this they stated that their target market isn't small creators.
Anyway I would really hope that all this would bring people to Peertube like the Twitter implosion did for Mastodon and the Reddit fails for Lemmy but it doesn't seem like it.
Thanks to stuff I learned about in the comments of previous posts on lemmy, I no longer see any YouTube ads. I’d say their plans are backfiring.
No, their plan is to rollout manifest v3 and most people will accept it.
How can I support the ad blockers?
I guess by using it a lot 😁
I think this will only end up with YouTube winning. Google has been caution for years, but they can bring the big guns if they see there are no more options. Google is clearly desperate to bring those numbers up and they don't care if user experience suffers.
First, they can decide to deploy a restrictive CSP that prevents external scripts from running in the page. This would break lots of extension that work on YouTube.
And then they can just enforce DRM like Netflix. This will be horrible for users, cost them more to serve, and potentially break Youtube for older clients. But then ads will be impossible to skip, and downloading videos will because almost impossible.
But if they decide the numbers are worth it, they will do it. But honestly at this point I really don't care. Will I miss YouTube? Sure. But I rather watch less content on nebula than support this horrible user experience.
Enforcing DRM has a big downside: it paints a massive target on the DRM implementation, and it will likely end up getting broken.
I rather watch less content on nebula than support this horrible user experience.
At this point the majority of channels that I like are on Nebula. You’re right, it won’t be a huge loss.
Indeed. It could be a huge win for Nebula, in fact. At least I hope if the users on YouTube lose that a different platform wins and it won't just be a net loss for users and YT-competitors.
Well, I'm not that pessimist, at least not on those 2 points. I hardly see how CSP would prevent addon to do their stuff, as CSP is protection against cross site attacks, and extension aren't sites (thought I actually remember having an issue like that once making an extension, but correcting the extensio's permissions solved it).
And DRMs only apply on the video stream. It won't protect the webpage or the javascript. Plus there are content on youtube that they are contractually required to not put behind DRMs.
What I'm worried youtube will do is simply that their server will refuse to send the video until a certain time after the user load the page, thid time corresponding to a bit less than the time the user would wait by playing ads.
It won't force the user to watch ads. But it'll deincensitive it by a certain amount.
Ads are a genuine real security concern if it became a choice between YouTube and adblockers it's bye YouTube for me.
Its a battle YouTube isn't going to win, and to be honest YouTube has never and will never be a viable business their best bets just asking for donations and playing nice to anyone using it.
I'd say this isn't an arms race. If Google wanted to end adblockers on YouTube right now they could. There is more at play here.
I don't agree with that. Anything they can do can be circumvented as long as there's people willing and able to do the work. And because YouTube is so ubiquitous I see that continuing.
They could certainly be more aggressive though. I think their pace is elaborate. Boil the frog slowly.
There's a lot of very motivated people trying g to stop adblockers on many platforms, I've never seen one that works without severely limiting the user experience.
And remember these are the most convenient and useful form of adblock. I don't think there is anything a site could do to stop the user just throwing a black box over the ad and muting the page.
Ultimately, no security works when the attacker has absolute control over the hardware.
I think the ad black box is where it will end up. A lot of people would probably not see that as much better than having an ad at that point, though. They don't even really need to make something impenetrable, they just need to keep breaking adblock so much so that people no longer see it as reliable and adblock developers grow increasingly tired of rewriting. So far, I can only recall a handful of times where adblock has straight up stopped working on YouTube.
I still only saw this popup once, some time ago. Go uBlock!
Compared to other sites, and their relative costs to run, and amount of ads. YouTube has been fairly ok. They have balanced the consumer friendly skip this video and sometimes short ads with the probably higher engagement metrics from them.
However YouTube the lite plan being discontinued right before this mostly means I'm going to move from Gmail to Zoho and wait for the ban.
The final YouTube lite plan didn't include removing ads from music, which seems to suggest the reason why YouTube music is bundled and maybe even exists, is in part the music industry being shitty.