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.
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.
To be fair, at the current monopolistic state of YouTube, how many people are actually likely to avoid YouTube completely?
If YouTube truly succeeded in forcing 90 seconds of unavoidable ads with no exceptions without paying $20/month then I genuinely think YouTube won’t be a monopoly for very long.
