I’m not too tech savvy so I appreciate responses in layman’s terms.
I have a rough concept of how NewPipe works, (correct me if I’m wrong though!) basically it’s a scrapper so it somehow reads the information in YouTube, anonymously, and filters the ads for you.
What I’m interested in knowing is, how does this behaviour look like from YouTube’s perspective. Can the platform “tell” that someone is accessing their content but not the ads that should go before and inbetween the videos? Do these views requested by NewPipe count towards the global amount of views a video has? Do content creators still get money from youtube ads with NewPipe views? Do they also get to see engagement data from views (such as which parts are skipped)? Etc etc.
Not an expert but at a certain point FreeTube introduced SponsorBlock in their code, and posted a blog post describing why it wasn’t on by default and how that choice was a good compromise toward the creators and to push for better form of monetization. A similar talk was had by NewPipe. From those link you can find all sort of details about the intended (and unintended) impact of those tools.
https://docs.freetubeapp.io/usage/sponsorblock/#disclaimer
https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/newpipe-and-online-advertising/
From those sources it’s easy to see that those technology are indeed transparent to some form of monetization.
Technology aside, I think it’s safe to assume YouTube incentivizes creators according to engagement and retention, no matter the technology used to see them or the ads shown, since what they are ultimately rewarding is the skill of the creator in grabbing human attention. How to maximize the monetization of that is secondary.