What makes you think that Youtube will "lose"? From a technical perspective, they have been rather conservative in their efforts so far. It can get so much worse, they could bake ads directly into the video stream or automatically randomize their API.

Don't forget that Google also owns Chrome, which by its dominance over the market can be used to effectuate DRM (such as widevine, or web integrity). They also own the Chrome Web Store, and they can ban any extensions that bypass Youtube ads (they already ban extensions with the ability to download Youtube videos, strangely they allow downloaders for any other site).

Google has a lot of money, and a lot of fingers in critically important pies, to make their wishes a reality should they deem to do so.

Pirates and crackers have won every single time in the history of BigCo vs BlackHat. The more draconian and clever google gets, the more talented hackers are drawn to the cause of defeating them, and the more motivated people become to spite them. The only winning move is not to play.

Depends on what you consider winning. Consider that out of the 20% of internet users that have adblock today, only a fraction will be willing to turn to illicit means should Google get serious, especially if it requires anything more complicated than installing an extension.

Also keep in mind that pirate groups are able to crack L1 Widevine only because some companies let the keys slip in a breach. The keys are burned as soon as they are discovered, making it impractical to disseminate them for public use.

It's only because individual movies/tv shows have a high enough value (versus the cost of cracking it, the risk of your keys being burned) that pirate groups are able to thrive. This wouldn't work well with Youtube as it's value is primarily derived from having a large quantity of content.

I don't think many people would be willing to pay per Youtube video as they do for a movie.

No they haven't. Consoles are the clearest example of where they lost, but also how frequently do new jailbreaks for modern iPhones appear?

Big tech can afford well paid security teams and uBlock Origin is a bunch of frustrated volunteers who are quitting now they're facing serious resistance for the first time. And Google haven't even exhausted 5% of their options.

I think YouTube will "win" this war, unfortunately. Even people that "join" individual channels cannot watch content from those channels if they use AdBlock. At some point these people are either going to buy premium or turn off the ad-blocker.

It boggles my mind that engineers and managers that have kids and are working on the YouTube team think this is okay and this is what the future of the platform should look like.

It's the beginning of the end of an era, and I'm immensely sad to see what the internet has become and where it is heading.

> At some point these people are either going to buy premium or turn off the ad-blocker.

Or they stop going to YouTube. In the past 12mo my use of these platforms has reduced a huge amount. I no longer visit Twitter or Reddit because they blocked 3rd party apps, forcing me to view adverts, I would rather not be a user on a user hostile platform.

Deep down, most of us know these are huge time sinks providing very little real value to ours lives so it doesn’t take much friction added by the platform to make people turn away from their bad habits.

What's the viable alternative to YouTube? Tiktok?

There are no good alternatives. There's literally no place left to get good topical or technical content without just loads of crap to go with it.

It's either a very depressing thing, or maybe an opportunity, depending on how rose colored your glasses are.

Various channels mirror their content to Nebula (also a pay platform, but with premium features), Odysee, Rumble, and yeah Tiktok.

> Even people that "join" individual channels cannot watch content from those channels if they use AdBlock

Is content from publishers you’ve subscribed to normally ad-free? I don’t understand the relationship between these things

YT is too big for people who hate ads to not invest a massive effort. The ad blocker endgame will be YT videos being "pre-watched" by a headless browser running in the background and the video data grabbed from there (either recorded or directly). You then watch the ad-less video in a custom frontend. If implemented correctly there's pretty much nothing YT could hope to do about this.

I'd even be cool with just blanking my screen and muting the sound when an ad is playing. Given my usual YouTube watching mindset, a brief moment to to just breath would be good for me.

Wasn't one of Kimdotcom's ventures scraping YT videos for the creation of his own streaming platform at some stage?

Seems like slightly less of greasy activity now than it was then.

"Count eight" about halfway down the page: https://cip2.gmu.edu/2015/09/22/lets-get-real-about-kim-dotc...

Sounds like how DVRs worked on cable TV back in the day. Some were even sophisticated enough to use the typical video cutout before commercials to auto skip them on playback.

Now, of course, we have community efforts like SponserBlock that could easily identify ad locations or some form of auto detection based on analyzing the video of they insert the ads at random locations in the video stream itself.

I'm certain this is coming. There's very little on YT I need to watch right now, and having a bunch of videos already downloaded and de-ad-ified would suffice. It would prevent the mindless watching anyway.

I think this is a bit backward in that the reason they're having to force it and facing resistance in the first place is that they've burned a ton of goodwill over the years through increasing ads, refusing to fix their DMCA process and letting their AI run rampant banning and demonetizing people at random with almost no way of actually talking to a human.

It's also kind of interesting to see people acting like it's entitled for people to be mad that the service that drove most other early competitors out by showing unsustainably low ads is now bait and switching by showing increasingly more ads. There's a reason there are more smaller competitors starting to pop up as YouTube has burned through leftover goodwill.

If you're neither paying YouTube any money nor watching their ads, meaning you're a pure money sink, why should they care about your goodwill?

Because you're an active user and thus help make the site "popular". We're seeing on Twitter what happens when management starts ignoring this basic logic of the internet.

Twitter pissed off their advertisers by pulling back content moderation. That is their biggest problem in terms of cash flow.

They're currently forcing logged-in users to share screenshots if they want to share something with non-logged-in friends and preserve any context whatsoever (you can no longer see replies, or what a xit was in response to, if you're not logged in—all you can see is a single xit). Search also doesn't work anymore if you're not logged in, and if you visit a user's page, their xits are ordered by some even-more-nonsensical-than-usual algo that puts years-old xits near the top. The site's basically totally unusable if you don't have an account.

This may be making some metric (account signups, presumably?) go up, but sure seems risky to me.

On Twitter and Reddit, the users most affected were also the people providing most value to the platform (tweets, reddit submissions, discussion, moderation). They're fairly symmetric platforms.

On YT, the people providing the value are the content creators. That is the same content creators who get a revenue share from ads and premium. They're the ones who benefit the most from blocking ad blockers. The people watching videos with ad blockers (and sponsor block)? They're not providing anything in exchange, to the platform or the creators.

If I'm referring thousands of people to YouTube, and I stop doing that while simultaneously joining the chorus of anti-YT sentiment on the internet, their bottom line should care.

good job you're not doing that then!

At this point I don't think anyone over the age of 3 doesn't know what YouTube is. I don't think much referring is happening by you.

Wow, someone actually playing the "you won't get a dime from me because you'll get something more valuable: exposure!" card against Youtube.

Nobody using the site is a pure money sink. Every video watched, in what order, on what topics, is data contributed to the machine. The fact that you’re blocking ads is even useful information.

I'd guess those people have friends that they share videos and shorts with. Those people might want to pay for premium or watch ads.

This is precisely isomorphic to the logic of not paying freelancers because "you're getting exposure", which every freelancer knows is bullshit.

Reminds me of DJT stuffing his caterer for his wedding — “but you will be able to tell potential clients that you catered my wedding!” — which was no help at all when she had to pay bills for the food and staff.

That's the price they pay for being ubiquitous. The alternative is to lose a good % of their userbase to a competitor that can make a better use of this audience.

That viewpoint will extend to others

I occasionally buy content from Youtube (primarily complete episodes of various series, occasionally a movie or movie rental).

a) there is no such user that is a pure money sink. Even without a subscription and all the ad blockers in the world they're still leaving a valuable data trail.

b) YT is a propaganda engine, too. It serves that end to allow nearly-unlimited membership.

I paid for premium for a while but had to use scripts to block the “other people watched” and other junk like shorts showing in my search results. Eventually I stopped my subscription and used adblockers instead.

I use YouTube to search for videos on subjects I want to watch, but it seems that Google want YouTube to be like a TV channel where you just turn it on and watch what they show you.

No TV channel that I've watched has stopped a few minutes into a program and asked me if I was still watching requiring interaction for the content to continue playing. Ever.

I don't think they will lose. The average luddite doesn't care about seeing ads and will look perplexed at you if you tell them about ad blockers. Other services injecting ads into video streams have already been 'winning' for years. Ultimately youtube will push the envelope until even the people paying for premium will be seeing ads and savvy people will move on to pre-downloading videos and stripping ads from them before watching or similar janky solutions.

I suspect it’ll be like Twitch where they tried hard for a while and then stopped because of the diminishing returns. YouTube will probably shake out everyone who doesn’t really understand tech and then find they are spending the same amount for less gains. And then the situation will stabilize again.

Where did twitch stop? Unless you do more and more custom shenanigans, uBlock origin has not blocked twitch ads for a long long time, and the ads are extremely repetitive.

You just use one script to block the ads. They used to work around that script all the time in 2021 but it has been stable for over a year now.

They haven't lost any good will from me. I don't feel entitled to use an ad supported service for free without the ads. Personally I've been paying for premium for a while and I find it worth it.

> I don't feel entitled to use an ad supported service for free without the ads

So don't watch things for free. Many people think that if a company is giving things for free you are not obligated to pay them in any way. The company can stop giving things for free if they can't afford anymore.

Did you always watch the ads on live TV? you never changed the channels, muted it, went to the loo, or fast-forwarded through the ads when you'd recorded something to VHS?

Ad-avoidance is hardly a new thing. And as ads have got increasingly obnoxious and untrustworthy, ad-avoidance technology has inevitably become more popular.

Let's start by looking at YouTube's incentives:

* don't waste infrastructure on freeloaders

* convince advertisers audience is seeing the ads they pay for

The content is free in the sense Google pays (close to) nothing and in the sense that creators can go to a different platform (as long as viewers come too).

Cost centers are data centers, bandwidth and labour maintaining the platform. Wrt. the latter, I would estimate the anti ad blocker stuff has significant costs, but isn't eating into the dev cycle in an existential way yet.

At some point they might be in trouble. Anyone have an idea when?

It’s streaming, YouTube can just embed the ads directly into the stream.

The youtube client I use is able skip (some) mid roll ads.

It's not Twitch, video is encoded in advance in various formats for different devices.

Embedding the ads into the stream is pretty difficult.

It's not uncharted territory. It's just more expensive comput-wise, and I expect google to make that calculation to conclude it's not worth the cost yet.

But compute costs could drop, and change the equation.

It's not just compute. It's storage, and network costs too. Right now they can cache the ads and video next to the user. But Google likes to target ads at particular users, in fact they formalised this in FLoC. In FLoC (since renamed to Topics API and now shipping in Chrome) groupings of users are called cohorts. There are lots of cohorts, eg: male / female, baby boomer / gen-Y / gen-Z / millennial, parents / single, religious / secular, conservative / liberal, income range. An ad might be targeted at a specific combination, such as conservative male parent. But there are a lot of possible combinations. Not 10's but 100's. This means you have to produce version of the video that targets each possible combination, and that in turn means your storage, network and computer costs balloon by 100's.

It's a big number. They avoid it by having the browser doing the mixing. I can't see that changing.

They don't want to show the same ads to everybody: they maximize their advertising income when they show different ads to different people depending on what people are interested in and buy.

After luxuriating in an ad-free YouTube it was shocking coming back to the "real world" -- too many, too often, and of no interest (and with all the info Google has on me?!)

Brave Browser has been great so far...