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Sooo. What are your plans for surviving the YouTube ad-pocalypse? In case you don't know, YouTube seems to be cracking down on ad-blockers, steadily ramping up their level of restrictiveness over the past 4 or so months, and ramping up even faster the last 3 weeks. Adblock Plus no longer seems to work for me on Chrome, but does work on Firefox. It'll probably be different for everyone as they dial it up for more and more customers, but it'll likely keep getting more restrictive as time goes on.
I'm guessing this has to do with the same tech trend that caused the layoffs this past year. Budgets are tighter, bubbles are popping, and sources of revenue are being more exploited. But I do wonder if this particular one will work out for Google or not.
I for one plan on leaving the platform if I ever am completely unable to make it work without ads. I think there are many others who feel the same way. This may (I hope) make things worse for content creators, especially those who rely on their own sponsorships for revenue, and will drive them towards other less restrictive platforms.
It's not like I think it's immoral or wrong for Google to pull this, but it does bother me. YouTube has been around for so long, it's life a part of my life. It's my TV, it's the way I learn and become better at most things, and for many many people, it's their livelihood. My wife randomly said to me last week as I was teaching myself some drumstick fundamentals (the kind of fundamentals with deep intricacies that you can't see easily, and need an in-depth video to go into), "how did anyone ever learn anything before YouTube?" After having been around for so long, and being so ingrained, it feels weird for YouTube to suddenly switch up how it works. I'm someone who likes to skip around videos and go back and forth a lot. When ads are present on YouTube, I cannot stand how you'll skip to a section of a video, even without having watched much actual content in the video yet, and suddenly have to watch a giant string of ads. Having to watch ads like that will ruin my usage of the platform.
I also wonder if it's technically possible for YouTube to completely crack down on all ad-blockers, but I don't know enough about how their APIs work. But since so much of it it's happening client-side, I think they'd have to control the client to have complete control. This might be why youtube no longer works on Chrome when I have adblock plus, but it still works on Firefox for me.
They're still trying in the background; Google's still pushing [Chrome Extension] Manifest V3 whose main purpose is to permanently cripple adblockers moving forward. Sure, they met resistance, but there's literally nothing stopping them from just going ahead and having 85% of all browsers (i.e. everything that isn't Safari or Firefox) instantly helpless to block Google's ads.
Sure, they'd lose some marketshare by doing that since Firefox will continue to work and people will start dusting off their old installs, but they'll still have complete capture of the intersection of the "I clicked the Install Chrome ad on Google because I click on everything I see/I just use Edge because it's literally the same thing" and the "my technical relative/acquaintance suggested I use uBlock Origin but if it changed I'd be screwed" crowd.
What about all the other Chromium browsers? I doubt they're obligated to adopt it.
They're obligated to adopt it if they don't want to spend developer time patching it out. Which they don't want to afford; after all, that is why they threw out their own browser engines in favor of Chromium in the first place.
And really, what business purpose does permitting adblock in Edge serve? MS runs ads too- even in the fucking Start menu- so they have an incentive to just adopt it wholesale.
It arguably makes sense for Brave (obviously- if they can afford it, of course) and Opera to spend time patching it out, but Google can make that very difficult if they so choose (they've been slowly doing a good chunk of what used to be in the Android Open Source Project into Play Services). And there's really no other browser engine to replace with- Gecko/Firefox never got its Electron moment because Mozilla's leadership is pants-on-head retarded and would rather LARP and invent programming languages they'll never directly see a dime from so it's not a viable replacement.
I disagree that they wouldn't devote the dev time, or at least build off older forks that didn't have Manifest V3, I'm no expert, but I don't think Google's implementation of extensions is critical for maintaining broader compatibility with standards.
While Microsoft certainly craves ad revenue, I think there's a decent chance they don't adopt it simply because it lets them claim that their version of Chromium is superior to the gimped one in Chrome. Maybe they won't encourage ad blocking, but a wink wink towards more savvy users can't hurt. They seem willing to take an outright loss per user, via reward programs and the like, if that lets them maintain their market share or wrest more of it away.
I guess we'll find out soon enough.
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