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?
Well, if it’s annoying enough, we would just… stop using it, I guess. That does put some limit on how much advertising they can shove down our engagement holes. So the ad-blockers could force them to be so obnoxious that they ostracize their user base, at least in principle :D
The ads are already aggressive enough that I won’t use it to host video (I’d rather just pay more and host it myself), and only use it to view content when I have no other option (e.g. reviewing a colleague’s work that they posted there for some reason). The youtube ads we get in VN are also quite loud and obnoxious, to be fair :D
In principle, I’d be willing to pay them for ad-free content, but frankly I don’t find the content or suggestion algorithm are useful enough for me to spend any time there. Other activities are just more interesting to me.