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youtube gives up (good ending). i mean it's a handful of people who are just doing this for a job because some PM is breathing down their necks, versus an entire planet of people with a burning passion for annihilating ads. it's unclear how long they can keep this up. i'm sure higher-ups thought about this and think they can commit to it, but as a dev, i can't imagine a more soul-sucking task than "force people to look at a thing we already know they don't want to look at. also you'll have to change how it works every day because they'll have found a way to stop looking."
in this case it's unlikely anyone will try it again, at least for a long time. remember, youtube took down ie6; if they can't take down adblock, then no one can
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youtube wins (bad ending). either the people with the technical chops get tired of being in the middle of a war, or youtube comes up with something incredibly clever, or they do the stupid freevee thing and just encode the ads right into the stream.
and then in this scenario, people en masse just give up and watch the ads.
now every other website sees that it can be done, that they can get away with it. they will all follow suit. the whole web will become a clusterfuck of ever-changing adblock evasions that no one can keep up with. (and remember, google serves a huge amount of the ads on the web!) adblock will still limp along, but it will be hit-or-miss forever
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they win but not how they wanted (weird ending). basically the same thing happens, up until:
people can't bear the ads, and can't block the ads, so they just stop watching youtube. there is a diaspora to other smaller platforms, maybe new and novel ones. perhaps we watch video less overall, and as a society become less shackled to the pipe of endless Content™ sludge. fifteen megacorps watch their bottom line plummet, the economy crashes, and we all become free
i've been paying for premium for like a year though so i have no idea how it's going atm
And it's not the one you think.
This video (smartly) argues that YouTube pays creators way too much for what they get out of it. The offering on YouTube tends to be lower quality than even bottom-of-the-barrel reality TV, which we collectively put up with because it's free. But this puts YouTube in a bind. Nobody is paying for YouTube Premium because there's no premium paid content worth your money on the platform. Why pay €$12/month for Premium when you can pay €$8/month for Netflix, €$5/month for Prime, or €$3/month for Disney+? Those platforms (allegedly) have stuff worth watching and with higher production values to boot.
The only sensible thing for YouTube to do here is to squeeze video makers on their revenue share. But since they don't want to do that for whatever reason, they've instead decided to wage war on those stupid nerds and their goddamn adblockers. They'll probably win this since most people don't care, and it will be disastrous for their ad revenue in the long term. But who gives a shit since number must go up this quarter, etc.
