Instead of blocking them, this extension speeds them up to x16 and also mutes the ad. Experiencing a 30 second ad in 2 seconds is pretty funny. And it works on Edge and Chrome.
Everyone’s hating on this approach but I think it’s nice that we have other options. I’m sure Ublock is going to come out on top of this cat and mouse game YouTube is playing with them, but if YouTube manages to temporarily disable Ublock I’ll look into this solution. Thanks!
Google will give up eventually. They’re definitely burning more money than they would gain from winning the battle
They give up on everything else all the time. I wonder if expanding their ad business is the one exception though. They ran out of new users and already pack videos full of ads. Forcing them on people who block them is the only thing left for them to attempt as they seek to continue perpetual growth.
Unfortunately the videos with ads absolutely packed through them are largely due to the creators choosing the settings for extra monetization.
I do not believe that is the case. Youtube ads are an insanely profitable business. I suspect throwing a couple dozen of FTEs on blocking ad blockers would be <1% of current revenue.
I don’t doubt they make tonnes of revenue from ads however you have to remember how small the share of adblocker users are. So the extra money from fighting the adblock user base is a clear gamble. Especially as those types of users are the ones who are more likely to avoid YouTube completely if they can’t bypass ads.
Someone in Google would have done the research because it’s not a simple case of war profit = adblockusers * ad revenue per user
I strongly believe they’ll stop once they hit a certain threshold/target of “reduction of adblock users”. They won’t go on like this forever.
