>> Maybe that’s how YouTube will win this war of attrition.
YouTube will win because they are financially incentivised to so so. UBO and other free blockers will fail because there is so much downside, and no upside.
Wars are always won by those with the most resources, whether it is money or people or both.
I say this not to gloat (I'm no fan of google) but rather because it can be useful to understand both the goals, and where the goals are leading to.
I know HN doesn't appreciate some truths being spoken, and I imagine I'll be down-voted, but YouTube is paid for by advertisers. Content creators are paid by adverts (and embedded sponsors.)
Yes we all want our entertainment for free. Yes we done want ads. Yes we dont want to pay for our content (or our software.) I get that, I really do.
But content creators need to eat. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth. Since I'm not chipping in, I appreciate advertisers doing so.
Personally, and this is not a recommendation, or a judgement, I don't use an ad blocker. I'd there are too many ads I stop visiting a site. For the rest, including YT, I understand what I get and I understand what I give. I get this is not the popular HN position. Each sees this his own way.
> YouTube will win because they are financially incentivised to so so. UBO and other free blockers will fail because there is so much downside, and no upside.
This has been the situation for the ad-blocking war since it started. If the pro-ads side is destined to win, they're sure taking their sweet time about it.
You call it a war, I'm not sure YouTube thinks of it that way.
YouTube revenue was 29.2 billion dollars in 2022. On the other side you have a couple guys complaining about Reddit users.
Sure, a few tech-savy folk install ad-blockers, and Google keeps the space dynamic enough to avoid it getting serious traction. But it's less a "war" and more of a minor irritation.
Winning isn't making ad-blocking go away, winning is 29.2 billion $. The entitled user base will do the rest.
> wars are always won by those with the most resources
Youtube's early success was in large part due to enabling mass music piracy. That war was won, principally, by youtube and pirates, when rightsholders agreed to youtune them distribute music for only meagre advertising revenue. Besides youtube, torrenting music continues basically unchecked today, despite the massive resources available to combat it, and the strong financial incentive to do so.
Along those lines, a general solution to youtube (or other) adblocking looks like: person 1 records their screen with a high def camera while a video plays, removes the ads, and creates a torrent of it. A simple browser extension detects a link to a youtube video, and redirects to a web torrent of the same video. An approach like this has no possible response from youtube, though hosting might be expensive, and availability might therefore be poor.
An instance of a similar solution to paywalling of content on various sites like patreon involves scraping the content and rehosting it elsewhere. Websites hosting such content are frequently very popular. One would imagine that patreon would be well resourced in this domain, but apparently they have been ineffectual.
YouTube will win because they are financially incentivised to so so. UBO and other free blockers will fail because there is so much downside, and no upside.
Wars are always won by those with the most resources, whether it is money or people or both.
I say this not to gloat (I'm no fan of google) but rather because it can be useful to understand both the goals, and where the goals are leading to.
I know HN doesn't appreciate some truths being spoken, and I imagine I'll be down-voted, but YouTube is paid for by advertisers. Content creators are paid by adverts (and embedded sponsors.)
Yes we all want our entertainment for free. Yes we done want ads. Yes we dont want to pay for our content (or our software.) I get that, I really do.
But content creators need to eat. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth. Since I'm not chipping in, I appreciate advertisers doing so.
Personally, and this is not a recommendation, or a judgement, I don't use an ad blocker. I'd there are too many ads I stop visiting a site. For the rest, including YT, I understand what I get and I understand what I give. I get this is not the popular HN position. Each sees this his own way.