I am not sure if this is not a sarcastic take, but I will bite.
Google are generally not coordinated well on anything, but this current war on adblockers is a notable exception. Consider the following 3 things all happening in the same time frame:
1. Youtube's rollout of detecting adblockers and updating their code a couple times a day to prevent you from running an adblocker
2. The manifest v3 standard
3. The Privacy Sandbox trash
They are using the dominant position of Youtube as video content platform (point 1), chrome/chromium (point 2) as a browser engine and their current dominant position in the ads market (point 3) to achieve a couple of goals. With the privacy sandbox, they force ads to go through their ecosystem, with the manifest v3 they deliver a big kick to the adblockers, and with Toutube, they are using one of their most successful platforms to further push their ads agenda.
To me, unskippable ads are going to:
- make me hate the brand that's wasting my time by advertising crap I don't need and making me watch it
- make me hate the platform on which this ad is played, especially knowing the platform jumped through specific hoops to make the ads unskippable for even the power users
Google are generally not coordinated well on anything, but this current war on adblockers is a notable exception. Consider the following 3 things all happening in the same time frame:
1. Youtube's rollout of detecting adblockers and updating their code a couple times a day to prevent you from running an adblocker
2. The manifest v3 standard
3. The Privacy Sandbox trash
They are using the dominant position of Youtube as video content platform (point 1), chrome/chromium (point 2) as a browser engine and their current dominant position in the ads market (point 3) to achieve a couple of goals. With the privacy sandbox, they force ads to go through their ecosystem, with the manifest v3 they deliver a big kick to the adblockers, and with Toutube, they are using one of their most successful platforms to further push their ads agenda.
To me, unskippable ads are going to:
- make me hate the brand that's wasting my time by advertising crap I don't need and making me watch it
- make me hate the platform on which this ad is played, especially knowing the platform jumped through specific hoops to make the ads unskippable for even the power users