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Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers
(www.engadget.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Technology
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I'd say this isn't an arms race. If Google wanted to end adblockers on YouTube right now they could. There is more at play here.
I don't agree with that. Anything they can do can be circumvented as long as there's people willing and able to do the work. And because YouTube is so ubiquitous I see that continuing.
They could certainly be more aggressive though. I think their pace is elaborate. Boil the frog slowly.
If they wanted an almost impossible skip they could bake ads directly into the video stream as its served to you. Facebook already has ads that are basically impossible to remove, and that's without the advantage of serving video content.
The article suggests they've tried this:
Though a low effort search on my part just now couldn't corroborate that. But even if current adblocking software can't handle it, real time commercial detection software exists and could, I assume, be applied here.
The best you'd get out of that would be a delay of up to the length of the ad before your video would play
Oh, yeah. Hadn't thought of that. Or maybe it'd just blank out the ad while it was playing and you'd just have to wait. Either way, annoying.
I got to thinking you could crowdsource it, like sponsorblock. But that'd probably only catch popular videos, and YouTube could just randomize what ads and when.
YouTube could make it impossible to skip, or at least impossible to entirely skip. If there hasn't been enough time between you requesting the ad frames and the frames at the start of the video it could simply refuse to give you the new frames
There's a lot of very motivated people trying g to stop adblockers on many platforms, I've never seen one that works without severely limiting the user experience.
And remember these are the most convenient and useful form of adblock. I don't think there is anything a site could do to stop the user just throwing a black box over the ad and muting the page.
Ultimately, no security works when the attacker has absolute control over the hardware.
I think the ad black box is where it will end up. A lot of people would probably not see that as much better than having an ad at that point, though. They don't even really need to make something impenetrable, they just need to keep breaking adblock so much so that people no longer see it as reliable and adblock developers grow increasingly tired of rewriting. So far, I can only recall a handful of times where adblock has straight up stopped working on YouTube.
I actively mute ads where I can't block them. It'd be annoying but I'd settle for a mute+black box if it was my only option.