137

Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers (www.engadget.com)

submitted 6 months ago by Bebo@literature.cafe to c/technology@beehaw.org

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

From the article: “In some ways, the current situation has spurred an arms race. YouTube has inadvertently improved ad blockers, as the new knowledge and techniques gained from innovating within the YouTube platform are also applicable to other ad and tracking systems.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] peter@feddit.uk 11 points 6 months ago

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.

[-] MiddledAgedGuy@beehaw.org 9 points 6 months ago

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.

[-] peter@feddit.uk 2 points 6 months ago

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.

[-] MiddledAgedGuy@beehaw.org 2 points 6 months ago

The article suggests they've tried this:

YouTube employs a wide variety of techniques to circumvent ad blockers, such as embedding an ad in the video itself (so the ad blocker can’t distinguish between the two)

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.

[-] peter@feddit.uk 1 points 6 months ago

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

[-] MiddledAgedGuy@beehaw.org 1 points 6 months ago

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.

[-] peter@feddit.uk 2 points 6 months ago

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

[-] saigot@lemmy.ca 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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.

[-] peter@feddit.uk 2 points 6 months ago

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.