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?
Youtube don’t need to eliminate adblocks; they just need the barrier of entry to be large enough to discourage the general population from blocking ads.
I think the whole reason YouTube started this crackdown is because adblocking has become a lot more mainstream and easily accessible.
Once they make blocking ads more difficult 95% of users will go back to watching ads, and it’s simply not worth the time & money to fight against the remaining 5%.
If you’re tech-literate enough to be on the fediverse, and willing to spend a half hour on adblocking, you’re not who YouTube’s targeting. You’re part of the stubborn 5% who will find a workaround for whatever YT throws at us.
Before this even started I basically fought tooth and nail to “force” my coworkers to install adblockers because just seeing them sit through ads hurt. They still refused to do it… Firefox and an adblock… Basically 2 clicks was too much lol
They don’t even need that. They just need it to be credible to advertisers. YouTube don’t really give a shit if anyone actually watches the ads, they just need the advertisers to believe they do.
They very recently removed the only reasonable legal alternative of Premium Lite (which I think never existed in North America).