YouTube is running an experiment asking some users to disable their ad blockers or pay for a premium subscription, or they will not be allowed to watch videos.
> The best they could do is have you wait the ad-time even if the ad is blocked but that would just mess with their analytics - they want to be sure the ad is being watched.
People will easily catch up with Youtube as there are thousands of people working on Youtube programming.
You can’t circumvent something clientside that is done on the server. When I grab a stream from Twitch, the first 10 seconds or so are always a “placeholder” image instead of the stream. There is nothing I can do while watching. I can of course remove it later, but not while watching.
I am not saying that Youtube has any chance of forcing you to watch ads. But there are technical means to prevent you from skipping ads as if they were never there. The question is simply when this becomes feasible to do. At the moment it’s apparently not feasible. But this could change.
> some clever checks on if you received (and therefore likely seen) the section of the video with the ads
Adblock would just evolve to politely answer “yes” when asked if the content had been received and played.
The server knows how long the ad was. It wouldn’t ask the client, it would simply “wait”.
That’s a description of this:
> The best they could do is have you wait the ad-time even if the ad is blocked but that would just mess with their analytics - they want to be sure the ad is being watched.
I was more answering to the last part
You can’t circumvent something clientside that is done on the server. When I grab a stream from Twitch, the first 10 seconds or so are always a “placeholder” image instead of the stream. There is nothing I can do while watching. I can of course remove it later, but not while watching.
I am not saying that Youtube has any chance of forcing you to watch ads. But there are technical means to prevent you from skipping ads as if they were never there. The question is simply when this becomes feasible to do. At the moment it’s apparently not feasible. But this could change.