- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Really interesting read about the history of YouTube adblocking, how the new detection works, how uBO is responding, and how not to block the new popups.
Really interesting read about the history of YouTube adblocking, how the new detection works, how uBO is responding, and how not to block the new popups.
The question is ‘Do they want to keep throwing money at techs in the hope of forcing people to watch their ads?’
At best, people will keep finding ways to get around the ads and YT will have wasted a ton of money on nothing.
At worst, a bunch of people will abandon YT all together. And YT will have wasted a ton of money getting rid of them.
Both options seem self-defeating and wasteful.
That is our win condition. To make it so costly for them that they bail on the idea. Because if we don’t, then it’s one step closer to their internet: locked down, hidden charges everywhere and content under their terms.
This isn’t just about ads, it’s about keeping information free.
The point is to make adblocking so tedious that only fairly tech literate people would do it. That cousin whose pc you set up and installed uBO on? They won’t figure out how to update the filters, they will just whitelist (or realistically just turn off uBO) or premium.
Basically nobody will actually abandon YT over this and those who do will be so low in numbers it is ~0 to YT.
There’s a great video on this that was made when YouTube first started rolling this out called The Cobra Effect: Why Anti-Adblock Policies Could Hurt Revenue Instead, and one of the points mentioned in the video is the rising number of people who use an adblocker, and not specifically mentioned but shown in the video is a graphic from an article from 2015 which shows that just under 43% of people use an adblocker. That number will have obviously changed in the past 7 years, but if we just use 25% of viewers as an estimate, that’s 25% of all viewers on YouTube who may turn to more “malicious” forms of adblocking such as things like AdNaseum and ReVanced or sites that host YouTube videos without the ads, and tell others to do the same if they’re sick of ads. And even if they do give up and watch the ads, the science says that people who use adblockers are much less likely to click on an ad and make a purchase, which is bad for advertisers since they pay for the number of views an ad gets and their clickthrough rate would go down, making it more expensive and less profitable to do business with YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIHi9yH6UB0