Eli5: Even though Google and Youtube have same owners, why Google do not block Adblocker ?
In: Economics
Firstly, it’s not technically possible in a browser. You are probably not very familiar with how the web works, but when a server (a computer Google owns that has youtube on it) sends data through the internet so that you can see what you see on youtube, it doesn’t send the final product. It rather sends the ingredients and your browser puts it together. This is kind of like you ordering food, but instead of receiving an already made pizza, you get flour, cheese, ham, and pineapple. At this moment you can obviously decide to just not add the pineapple (adblock), or you could even add some salami (lyrics extension for youtube) that you already have home. Feel free to ask a separate question if you want to understand why the internet works like this.
But, they could at least block adblock, ublock, and other similar extensions from the chrome store, but they still don’t, which leads us to the second reason why Google doesn’t block adblockers. They actually like them. Google likes adblockers because it makes their ads more efficient. People who use adblockers would never click on an ad anyway, but they would be shown the ad, which reduces the click through ratios and their ads just seem less efficient. On top of it, people who use adblockers would likely use Google services less if they would not have a way around it, which would leave some of the market for competition. Google doesn’t just like adblockers, they love them. Advertisers don’t care how many times an ad is seen, but how much a product is bought, so they really like to show the ad only to people who are likely to buy, which are users who don’t use adblockers.
Google doesn’t want to get a bad rap by blacklisting adblockers on desktop browsers.
However, the ads are still shown on mobile apps since adblockers aren’t supported by native apps like youtube on iOS and android.
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