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Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers (www.engadget.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.”

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If they wanted an almost impossible skip they could bake ads directly into the video stream as its served to you. Facebook already has ads that are basically impossible to remove, and that's without the advantage of serving video content.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The article suggests they've tried this:

YouTube employs a wide variety of techniques to circumvent ad blockers, such as embedding an ad in the video itself (so the ad blocker can’t distinguish between the two)

Though a low effort search on my part just now couldn't corroborate that. But even if current adblocking software can't handle it, real time commercial detection software exists and could, I assume, be applied here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The best you'd get out of that would be a delay of up to the length of the ad before your video would play

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Oh, yeah. Hadn't thought of that. Or maybe it'd just blank out the ad while it was playing and you'd just have to wait. Either way, annoying.

I got to thinking you could crowdsource it, like sponsorblock. But that'd probably only catch popular videos, and YouTube could just randomize what ads and when.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

YouTube could make it impossible to skip, or at least impossible to entirely skip. If there hasn't been enough time between you requesting the ad frames and the frames at the start of the video it could simply refuse to give you the new frames