The endgame here is adblockers that spoof ad views and even sometimes clicks rather than just blocking them. This is very very bad for google if they force adblockers to work like that. People will do it.

Another possible endgame is all YouTube videos are livestreams and you cannot skip on the timeline, with ads inserted directly into the stream.

In that world, the best an adblocker would be able to do is show a blank screen for 30s while it waits for the real video's frames to resume.

If YT only live streams content, content caching services will strip out the ads, and play with a delay.

Youtube will never monetise tech savvy users and should just stop trying. We only need to be slipperier than the average gazelle and the lions will never catch us.

> content caching services will strip out the ads, and play with a delay.

To achieve this, you’ll need computation, storage, and bandwidth on the scale of YouTube. Do you think whoever offers that service will do so without ads or payment?

Your whole scheme is based on hoping “kind” and knowledgeable volunteers do free labor for you. Good luck.

I for one am tech savvy and am happy to pay $20 for the ad free service. Pretty reasonable trade if you ask me.

If you play with a delay, then why would you need any more storage than what is required to play a single video?

Personally I would not pay any amount to Google, as I believe it is unethical to support such a company. Google has a monopoly in several markets, to the point of being an unavoidable part of our lives.

No single company should have that much power. Especially since due to its nature as a for-profit corporation, Google's interests are at odds with yours.

I have a great solution in that case - just block all Google's services and don't use them. Just don't complain when more and more IT news publications put up a paywall, because ad revenue isn't enough to pay your salary.

As for myself - most of my subscription price goes to the creators and I'm happy with that.

I don't need massive amounts of compute, storage, or bandwidth to run an app on my PC that "watches" the video and does those things offline, so I can watch the whole thing later without ads.

It already exists for twitch, check out TTV LOL. And you can host your own proxies too. Underestimating the sophistication of adblocking is foolish, people understand well that spending time to save time watching ads is worth it.

> all YouTube videos are livestreams and you cannot skip on the timeline, with ads inserted directly into the stream.

So we really are back to reinventing cable TV

Now that I think about it, they could implement timeline skipping support on the server. Select a time, the server alters your personal livestream and can still inject ads at any moment

Nope, twitch does this and we already have working adblockers for it. The twitch adblockers use a network of proxies.

Luckily now with AI this is not the problem it once was.

How will AI help you? Make the screen blank for 30s while waiting for ad to end?

Right now it will tell you what the ads are. So, if the video is played on a delay, it can remove ads, even baked into the video.

And, coming up in foundation models right now, it can remake videos to remove ads entirely, making a new video with just the content. Perhaps it'll be a feature of the RTX 6090. I bet the hallucinations will be hilarious.

And the business buy the ads which get seen by no one, yet still Google makes money, just like with their other ads.

Or, the businesses realize what's going on and they stop buying ads from Google, since nobody sees them anyway, and Google makes less money. Google isn't holding all the cards like they might think, here.

Let them stop sending us bytes then. Let them charge everyone for access.