this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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158
Youtube Adblock Reckoning as a service problem? (startrek.website)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

encode ads as part of the video file

I suspect that an AI could be trained to be able to recognize ads, or at least the most annoying, ads.

Also, a community driven project, like SponsorBlock, where users identify ads to build up a database could be created.

These are just a couple of ideas to defeat embedded ads, and I'm not a genius programmer by any means. This is just another front in a war that has been going on since at least the 90's and as long as blocking ads is less annoying than watching them, we're winning.