From the article: “In some ways, the current situation has spurred an arms race. YouTube has inadvertently improved ad blockers, as the new knowledge and techniques gained from innovating within the YouTube platform are also applicable to other ad and tracking systems.”
I don’t agree with that. Anything they can do can be circumvented as long as there’s people willing and able to do the work. And because YouTube is so ubiquitous I see that continuing.
They could certainly be more aggressive though. I think their pace is elaborate. Boil the frog slowly.
If they wanted an almost impossible skip they could bake ads directly into the video stream as its served to you. Facebook already has ads that are basically impossible to remove, and that’s without the advantage of serving video content.
The article suggests they’ve tried this:
Though a low effort search on my part just now couldn’t corroborate that. But even if current adblocking software can’t handle it, real time commercial detection software exists and could, I assume, be applied here.
The best you’d get out of that would be a delay of up to the length of the ad before your video would play
Oh, yeah. Hadn’t thought of that. Or maybe it’d just blank out the ad while it was playing and you’d just have to wait. Either way, annoying.
I got to thinking you could crowdsource it, like sponsorblock. But that’d probably only catch popular videos, and YouTube could just randomize what ads and when.
YouTube could make it impossible to skip, or at least impossible to entirely skip. If there hasn’t been enough time between you requesting the ad frames and the frames at the start of the video it could simply refuse to give you the new frames