I often see the sentiment that YouTube and adblockers will be forever locked in a cat-and-mouse game. However, for many years now, Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking on desktop web.
What is stopping YouTube from replicating Twitch’s advertising strategy of embedding ads directly into their videos?
Honestly, I have no real clue.
Twitch isn’t quite completely impervious to adblockers, with proxy extensions allowing us to skip ads still for now, but YouTube could do the exact same thing tomorrow if they wished. uBlock Origin wouldn’t save you, SponsorBlock wouldn’t save you, the only thing that could be done would be a black screen whenever an ad pops up.
Maybe YouTube doesn’t want to fall into the hole Twitch is in, with the proxy loophole, and they view fighting adblockers as a better choice than having to spend a massive amount of encoding expense to have the silver bullet in every country.