New chapter in YouTube’s fierce fight against ad blockers… and perhaps the last?
In any case, it must be admitted that Google has a lot of ideas. After the firm tested several ways to push users to subscribe to YouTube Premium to get rid of advertisements, the firm is preparing to strike a (very) big blow. According to the publisher of the SponsorBlock plugin, which allows you to skip sponsored passages from videos on YouTube, Google tries to inject advertisements directly into the video stream, making them impossible to skip.
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Ads integrated into the feed
SponsorBlock is concerned about its Mastodon account after noticing that Google was apparently trying to embed ads in videos “server-side.” That is to say before the video reaches the user. Translation: the advertisements would be directly included in the source video file, effectively preventing the many ad blocker extensions from working.
What particularly poses a problem is that this method modifies the chapters and timestamps of the videos. Valuable data for SponsorBlock, in that it allows contributors (SponsorBlock is an extension powered by its community) to indicate precisely when the advertising passage starts. With the native integration of advertisements into the feed, everything is shifted, and the extension loses its interest.
The developers of SponsorBlock say they have found a temporary solution, by blocking submissions from web browsers allegedly affected by this new feature. A bandage on a wooden leg: because if YouTube decides to generalize this practice, the entire ecosystem of ad blocking extensions will be threatened.
Adblockers soon to be obsolete on YouTube?
After trying to prevent videos from playing if an adblocker is detected, or even more recently to suppress sound if a fraudulent extension is detected, YouTube could have put its finger on a particularly effective method for serving its advertising.
Today, the video being played and the ad being served are represented by two separate streams. An adblocker works quite simply: thanks to a huge database of URLs identified as belonging to advertisers. These addresses blocked, only the desired video is played by the web browser.
However, if YouTube starts to include advertising content within the video stream itself, blockers will not even know that an ad is currently playing. They will only see one URL: that of the YouTube video. We therefore imagine that Google will create two versions for each video: one without advertising for its Premium subscribers and another including ads. But this could cause a colossal overload on its servers, in that it would probably be necessary to duplicate a large part of the approximately four billion videos hosted on the platform.
