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.
Shitty AdBlock Plus.
ABP has always been a shitty adblocker because it’s meant to make money rather than actually block ads effectively. They’ve been accepting money from ad networks to allow their “unintrusive ads” (an oxymoron) for over a decade now, and I’m sure Google is paying for this to happen now.
shrug
I’m okay with unobtrusive ads as long as the place serving them up has a modicum of common sense sensibilities about their impact and has a rigorous enough vetting process that they’ll never be used as payloads for malicious software. Ads can be a way to find out about products I might otherwise never know about. I’m not outright against all ads as a concept. Hell, sometimes it’s an actual art form in rare cases.
I’m just against them taking up more space than the content itself, impeding my access to the content in any way, hijacking my property, or getting hijacked by malware which then hijacks my property.
Too bad Google doesn’t want to have a conversation, at least one that isn’t at gunpoint. I wouldn’t mind unintrusive ads. If it stayed at banner ads and things like that, I would probably enable them. Shoving crap in the middle of videos just makes it a horrible experience, so I’m going to get rid of them.
An Adblocker allowing ads to… start a conversation that’s already been had and over for decades at this point.
People don’t like intrusive ads. Give intrusive ads and we’ll always find ways around them. It’s a story as old as the internet. Google is no exception. You may have billions of dollars and thousands of employees but nearly everyone in the damned world hates ads. You can try to fight it all you want. The only reason that nearly anyone puts up with ads is they want to support the creator or don’t yet know they can avoid the ads. Even those supporting the creators don’t like the damned things.
I’ve seen so, so many people watching ads on their phones