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?
Short-term, absolutely.
Long-term? Bad product experience is why people bought those eye patches, or straight up moved to another platform.
I’m not sure it’s going to be that easy to pirate your way out of this. The amount of content is so vast it’s nearly impossible to host in a free way. I’m happy to pay for YouTube premium to support the creators, as well as paying for Nebula and Dropout for content, though neither can entirely replace YouTube’s vast amount of content and interface.
Mostly just thinking about streaming services on the eye patch part(seriously, screw region and VPN lock).
Personally I’m not that against ads, the issue is how annoying they often gets, and I have a bad feeling if they are actively seeking maximum ad revenue.
Even if we pretend youtube isnt actually just a data farm that alphabet sells under a different company name to avoid directly saying youtube sells your data (hint: this is where the majority of youtube money comes from), it doesnt really matter if enough consumers decide the ads arent worth the content.
Youtube isnt required living, its a very nice convenience. If it stops being convenient, people will do literally anything else. Its already only convenient enough for a lot via ad blockers. The worse it gets, the more leave ads behind. Making it worse worse doesnt bring people back.