Hi all,
As the title says, YouTube is trying to restrict ad-blockers. But the ones that I am using are freely available through Chrome WebStore. Both Chrome and YouTube are owned by Google. Why would a company try to fight an issue with one subsidiary while giving us an out for the same issue through another?
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In: Technology
Youtube is not in charge of Google, Google is in charge of Youtube. Google is not against ad blockers, Youtube is against ad blockers, on Youtube.
It’s also easier to fight ad blockers when you know what ad blockers do to stop your ads, since it’s not hard at all to add extensions that are not on the extension webstore. Ad blockers won’t go away if you ban them from the webstore, people will just download them from a 3rd party, and then they have no idea what each ad blocker does, or even which ones are available.
Likely because if Alphabet (The owners of both Google and YouTube), had Google make changes to the most popular browser in the world, to help push Google Ads the most popular ad service in the world, on YouTube the worlds largest digital video distribution network in the world. They might open themselves up to antitrust legislation, and have to start paying fines.
They would rather make changes more discretely.
I think it’s because adblockers became available before Google acquired YouTube. Now it owns YouTube it’s walking a fine line between trying to maintain Chrome’s competitiveness and raking in cash through YouTube. As is often the case, different departments in a big company don’t necessarily talk to each other or even like each other. My guess would be YouTube is pushing Chrome to completely remove adblocking extensions but Chrome has its own annual goals to reach and damn if it’s going to let the new kid on the block dictate what they do.
There is not much chrome can do when blocking ads is mostly client side. They remove the extensions from the web store, you can use tapermonkey. They detect when you use adblockers and block you from visiting the website, adblockers get better and simulate that you load.the ad. They push all that too much, chrome loses their competitiveness in the market.
The truth is, not many people use adblockers. And they know it so for now it’s not a war they can win much and they can lose a lot.
Google isn’t against ad-blockers in general. Google is against Google’s ads being blocked. They are taking action, specifically with YouTube, because they are trying to sell YouTube Premium as a service, which effectively is the same thing that the ad-blockers (and YouTube Vanced, which is what really started all of this) provides for free.
All that said, what u/TheLuminary said also holds true. They can take action against things like YouTube Vanced because it was basically pirating their code. Pushing things like Manifest 3 as an API doesn’t really constitute an abuse of monopoly power as doing so doesn’t force people into doing things their way. However, taking advantage of the fact they they hold the majority market share on web browsers to impose their will for the sake of profit wouldn’t sit too well with Government.
It’s worth noting that the most important parts of Chrome are open source—as the Chromium project, which also powers Edge, Opera, and other browsers. Chrome does have some proprietary features, but everything you need to browse the web is in Chromium.
That’s not something Google can take back. If they tried messing with Chrome too much, someone would just release a Chrome clone based on Chromium. And they’re probably pretty aware that trying to lock down Chrome to force ads is a great way to drive people to other browsers.
There’s also the fact (which the YouTube execs seem unable to understand) that people using ad blockers weren’t going to click your ads in the first place. Advertisers would *prefer* those people use adblock, because it’s a waste of money to show ads to people who despise them that much.
It’s important to know that Google isn’t the one providing the ad blocking extensions. Third-party developers create the ad block extensions and upload them to the store. While Google could theoretically stop allowing such extensions in the store, they wont for two main reasons
1. Doing so would be a PR disaster for Google and could possibly result in numerous lawsuits.
2. It would destroy chrome’s market share, affecting their ability to push other google services via chrome.
In the end, the best they can really do is try to weaken ad blocking extensions (see the Manifest v3 drama) and modify their sites to try and detect when one is used.
It doesn’t. That’s why Google manifest v3 will make it much harder for adbockers to work.
Basically Google will change chrome extensions to requires Google approval for each update, including it’s blocking list.
So instead of people quickly and directly getting updated block list from the adblocker provider themselves, they will need to get the update from Google Chrome extension store.
The problem is that each update pushed thru chrome extension store could take days to weeks for approval / rejection. So by the time the update is released, it could already be out of date.
Before:
* adblocker: here’s the new list
* your chrome: okay
Future:
* adblocker : here’s the new list
* chrome extension store : lemme check them first
* 1 week later, your chrome got the update (that’s already out of date).
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