Re:YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin
by repelsteeltje on Sunday October 29, 2023 @03:31PM
(#38061807)
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?
* 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?