787
submitted 11 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.::YouTube's dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there's an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 11 points 11 months ago

The resource implications are the problem. The cost - in terms of compute time - to bake those ads eats into the profit earned from advertising as a whole. Since only a fraction of users adblock, they would probably lose more money than they gained.

They'll consider it once the compute cost inserting the ads is low enough that it's worth it. I have no idea if we've reached that point yet, but I'm guessing not, since otherwise they'd already be doing it.

[-] privatizetwiddle@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 11 months ago

Most of the formats served by YouTube are already chunked, which means they can easily insert different chunks of video (ads, etc) at various points in the stream by changing the manifest. This is trivial, computationally. The complexity lies in building the mechanisms to make it work.
The non-chunked formats are only used by older devices, and are lower quality. Those would require re-encoding to change, but few users see them anyway, and those users probably don't adblock.

this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
787 points (97.9% liked)

Technology

59169 readers
2572 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS