I often see the sentiment that YouTube and adblockers will be forever locked in a cat-and-mouse game. However, for many years now, Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking on desktop web.
What is stopping YouTube from replicating Twitch’s advertising strategy of embedding ads directly into their videos?
A big difference is that Twitch livestreams are creating content as reality happens. You can’t skip ahead, you can’t pre-load into a buffer. YouTube would need to take those features away to allow for similarly effective ad enforcement, which would eliminate a significant advantage of VODs.
I’ve never used twitch. You can’t preload? Like, you can’t just pause while someone does their paid spot and then skip past it?
That one can be realized client-side (just don’t actually pause the stream download, but rather write it into a buffer). No idea, if there actually is a client that implements this, but it is conceptually possible.
I rather meant that with a livestream, people don’t want to be several minutes behind. They want at most a few seconds delay, so they can collectively chat about the things happening in the stream and reasonably hold conversations with the streamer.
What you can do as well, is to just pause the stream when the ad starts and then reload when you imagine the ad might be over…