At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking. Either by hook or by crook those that want to use Adblockers are going to keep doing it no matter what.

And to be clear, I am not trying to equate Adblocking to video piracy. To me, the fact that I choose to go to the bathroom during a commercial of a tv show doesn’t constitute piracy and Adblocks just automate that process for me on Youtube. I would also never click on an ad purposefully, no matter what it is for.

With all that being said, I am a hopeless cause and I don’t think that anything will convince me to buy YouTube premium, but I also used to think that about MP3s.

My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?

This is an old article but this is Gabe Newell describing video game piracy as a service problem and why he believes that in case anyone is unfamiliar with it.

  • Nipah
    7•1 year ago

    My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?

    My initial/gut reaction was “obviously relevant ads based on the content I’m watching”, but I don’t care how relevant the ad is when I’ve seen the same Raid Shadow Legend ad across multiple videos I’m gonna try to skip it (or as I did long, long ago: adblock it).

    I don’t even know what actual YT ads are now, only the integrated creator ones that they’re personally sponsored by… the hello fresh and world of tanks and manscape and debrand etc., which I’ve started auto-skipping on a channel by channel basis based on very few criteria: the entertainment value/effort they’ve put into the ad (so Drew Gooden is usually always funny and gets a pass, same for channels like Wulff Den or Th3Jez or Critical Role) but certain ones just get manually skipped regardless (no matter how funny you are, I don’t want to sit here and listen to you talk about Manscape for 3 minutes) and how often I end up seeing them (which in these instances, isn’t often because they’re channel specific usually)

    So I guess it mainly boils down to relevant ads that aren’t soulless and that I don’t see 3x every other video?