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Re:Firefox Preview adds support for recommended extensions, ... by shadowgovt on Wednesday February 05, 2020 @09:42AM (#22247009)
Probably an arms race where the losers are smaller players who lack the resources to compete.

Twitter, Facebook, et. al. have the engineering resources to get creative and devise solutions (such as inlining advertising in such a way to make it computationally difficult to divorce it from desired content---YouTube, for example, has control of the video source and if necessary could start splicing ads directly into the video vended to users in a way indistinguishable from the content itself). The firms that can't afford to do that are small newspapers, individual developers, etc. They'll either pay their own way to put content up, GoFundMe a support base for their content, or give up and do something else.

The result will probably be a more centralized and perhaps less diverse world wide web. Content-agnostic advertising made a lot of room for "little ideas" to find footing. Without a similar model to that, web content defaults to a patronage model for every piece of content that isn't immediately monetizable. This is how the web worked before content-agnostic advertising (i.e. you only put up content if you were in the government, military, university, or paid someone with access to the backbone) and we could go back to that model, but it'd be a smaller web for it.

Re:Firefox Preview adds support for recommended extensions, ... by toxican on Wednesday February 05, 2020 @10:29AM (#22247541)
Definitely an arms race. There's already a solution for if YouTube injects ads directly into the videos -- https://sponsor.ajay.app/ it works for skipping ads inserted by the creators, at least.
Re:Firefox Preview adds support for recommended extensions, ... by shadowgovt on Wednesday February 05, 2020 @10:45AM (#22247749)
And currently YT et. al. inject the ads by swapping video streams because it's more technically convenient than re-rendering a video on their servers.

If video ad blockers take off enough to impact that technological solution, they'll shift to embedding ads directly by modifying the video content itself, because after the up-front cost it becomes win-win for them; the ad blockers will turn a tech like that into a "moat" that YT et. al. can use to keep competing video services at bay. Then the ad blockers will iterate to do their own crowd-source digital fingerprinting of ad content and time-skip around in the video, so the ad companies will iterate to make ads hard to fingerprint or onerous to successfully time skip, etc.

Each step in this arms race creates another technological moat to make YT more ad-revenue-viable than possible competitors, who will have to operate on some other revenue stream (and what that revenue stream could be is unclear---subscription model, so only those with disposable income can view videos? Creator-supported model, so only those with disposable income can upload?).