this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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TL;DW: the ads will be in the video stream itself which will mess up timestamps, sponsor block uses timestamps to know when the ads are.
Seems to me that this will also break every other use case of specific times like direct linking to a timestamp of a video, right?
This sucks for so many. People use timestamps for content warnings or to help viewers avoid spoilers. Commenters use timestamps when talking about the content of the video. It's insane to change this once it's so ingrained in how people use the website.
It's also how content creators literally create chapters: put the time codes into the video description
That's a native feature of the platform
Oh shit, I didn't even think about that. What the hell.
Hopefully they'll realise it's a bigger breaking change than they wanted as part of this testing phase
You assume they give a fuck
Yeah I do. They still want to be able to sell their premium subscriptions and not every engineer working on the product is some soulless corpo. If they can break all adblockers without damaging their product they will, but if it fucks things up too much then they'll go back to the drawing board and try something else.
I'd imagine YouTube subtracts the ad length from posted timestamps when clicking a link containing one. But we are taking about Google, soooooo...
If Google can do that then hopefully sponsor block can too!
In the cat and mouse game, the cat can adjust tactics but the mice eventually figure out an alternative route. I'm sure they will find a way with this. Either that or a lot of people will just stop watching YouTube, I'd imagine.
A truly shocking number of people don't use any form of adblock. I doubt that driving off the adblock users will have a significant effect on viewership (and even if it does, why would Google care, it's not like we're making them money).
There's also plenty of people that do use adblock today, and would just put up with ads if it stopped working.
So the actual number of people that would simply stop using YouTube altogether is lower than the number of people that use adblock today.
And from YouTube's perspective, those people aren't contributing revenue anyways, and all they get is a little bit of usage data. Easy trade.
Yup. Much the same suit as the Reddit migration, sadly.
Unless a random number of ads are injected into the video that changes every time it's viewed... Which is how they already work aside from being directly part of the video stream.
It will end up being like FreeVee on Prime for anyone who's ever watched a movie or anything on there. They straight up randomly just inject ads in at random times, often not even during scene breaks. Characters are sometimes mid-sentence... Oh, and we're back to the volume of the ads being 2x louder than the movie itself because I guess that law Congress passed way back in the day only applied to cable and broadcast TV.
It makes it nearly unwatchable. So get ready for that experience.