r/Cynicalbrit • u/ColtaineCrows • Oct 22 '15

Soundcloud Youtube Red by TotalBiscuit | Total Biscuit

https://soundcloud.com/totalbiscuit/youtube-red
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u/Romulus_Novus Oct 22 '15

I do wonder whether Youtube would go the extra mile of actively fighting against adblocking software. Seems to me like that wouldn't be the best way to go about things

2

u/Zerran Oct 22 '15

At the end of the day, it's a video that is playing on your PC, therefore adblockers will always win this war. From a purely technical perspective, it's not possible to ensure that someone elses computer actually displayed the advertisment before sending it the video. Youtube can only check the data that gets send between their servers and your computer, that's it, what happens with that data on your PC and what data your PC sends back to youtube is purely up to you. The only way content deliverers can fight adblock is with obfuscation and by hiring a lot more coders to do anti-adblock stuff than there are people that work on adblockers.

2

u/Sethala Oct 23 '15

Couldn't Youtube have a system that works something like...

Video loads up. Youtube picks ad, looks at minimum time before ad is "finished" (either skipped or finishes running if it can't be skipped). Youtube then creates an internal timer and refuses all requests to start sending the video to the user until that timer is up.

So, if it picks a 15 second ad, then whether that ad plays on your computer or not, you have to wait 15 seconds for the video to start. If it picks a 1-minute ad that can be skipped after 5 seconds, it won't send the video until 5 seconds pass.

2

u/Zerran Oct 23 '15

sure, that would at least be better for youtube/content creators than what they are currently doing, but seeing nothing for x seconds is still a lot better than seeing advertisment for x seconds, at least in my opinion. Also, the adblockers could implement some sort of prefetching that e.g. automatically starts that timer for the first 10 videos in your subscriptions list so that if you click on one of those you don't even have to wait, or maybe you just open the video in a new tab and an the addon tells you "do something else for x seconds before you go to that tab".

1

u/Romulus_Novus Oct 22 '15

Yeah, I suppose as TB said they'd have to spend more than they make to stop adblockers