YouTube vs. Ad blockers: What All of Us Should Learn from this Internet War

In one of our previous newsletters, we have already called YouTube’s waging war on ad blockers one of the worst moves in the ad industry. The hype train was still going, and it was only natural to join the opposition forces (because we like attention and clicks like any other media).

Now that the dust has settled, the people’s interest has moved on, and the ad war has come into stasis, it’s time to look into the conflict with the attention it truly deserves. Why is a multi-billion corporation cutting costs? Is ad blocking even legal? Who’s the bad guy, and who to blame?

We can’t promise clear answers to any of these as the matters are still up in the air, but at least we can promise not to be boring with them🙃

What’s the Deal with YouTube vs. Ad Blockers?

By this point, we all know how digital advertising works. To put it simply, the publisher places ad tags on their web page/app that communicates with an ad server/DSP to look for an advertiser who’s willing to buy the ad placement.

Ad blockers prevent this connection. The minute you start loading the page, an ad blocker looks for the HTTP requests, checks if they belong to “ad requests” via filter lists, and, if they match – blocks the ads. 

There’s some variety to the process (like network-wide ad blocking), but the general mechanism is mostly it. 

On the contrary, publishers have their own tools that either bait ad blockers, reinsert ads, or detect them with scripts to prevent users from content until they disable the software.

Users with ad blockers vs. ad businesses with anti-ad blockers is a tale as old as digital advertising itself. The former don’t want ads; the latter don’t want to lose money. So far, there has been no clear winner, but the balance of power has surely changed when Google entered the game.

The Battle with Ad Blockers: The Chronicle

The first movements from YouTube started in May 2023. At first, the notorious pop-up message was simply an experiment (at least that’s what YouTube spokespeople claimed) in certain regions. 

The local tests didn’t take long to stop being local tests and become a global phenomenon. September was the first month of the gradual anti-ad block roll-out. In October, the company started claiming that using ad blockers violates the platform’s terms of service.

In November, the general public was already lynching YouTube as Google presented the Manifest V3. The Manifest V2 is a set of rules that determine how browser extensions work now. The Manifest V3 is an update to the system that will “increase security,” as stated by Google, and limit the capabilities of ad blockers. 

How is that gonna happen? Well, Google is going to eliminate a “WebRequestAPI” – the one allowing ad blockers to modify requests so simply and quickly. Simply put, instead of having a list of 300,000 filtering rules, your uBlock Origin or AdBlock Plus will only have 30,000. 

The Manifest V3 is planned for June 2024. Will it be as effective in practice as it seems in theory? Will Google actually release it, or are we going to have another “cookie situation”? Only God knows, but one thing is for sure – Google is very serious about all of this.

Lesson # 1. Ads Are the Needle of YouTube

As much as all of us love watching videos without having to pay for them, like in the days of the good old web, YouTube is a business, and its parent company, Alphabet, wants more money expects higher revenue. 

We all know about more than two million videos being uploaded to the platform every day and gazillions (440,000 +-) of terabytes of data being consumed daily, but we’ll never know how profitable YouTube is. We know it probably is now, but has it always been like that?

Remember 2015? Ah, yes, the year when YouTube was almost ideal, and the ads were almost non-existent. Well, according to a dusty WSJ article, YouTube was NOT profitable back then. A lot of time has passed, but the build-up of the YouTube ad aggression seems, at least, reasonable.

We see the 39 billion dollars coming from YouTube’s ad revenue. That’s enormous money, making 90% of YouTube's total profits. Once again, we’ll never know how expensive it is to maintain and develop the platform, but we do know that YouTube heavily relies on advertisers to generate profit.

After the advertisers left YouTube in 2017 and did it again in 2019, it’s natural that YouTube did everything possible to prevent them from leaving the boat again. And, unfortunately, judging by the revenue rise in Q4 2023, it works…

Lesson # 2. Ad Blockers Will Always Adapt

“The desire for free stuff is innate in mankind.”

If there’s at least a hint of a crack in the paywall, somebody will find out how to completely crash it – publishers have figured this out a long time ago. 

That’s why most small/middle-sized pubs don’t restrict their content completely when an ad blocker is detected but instead just ask to disable the extension and support the content. 

On the contrary, large publishers like Forbes don’t really care and have enough influence to just block you from content if you don’t want to see ads.

Being the latter, YouTube is a powerful enough platform to do whatever they like. 

Not giving you access to ad-blocking DOES violate YouTube Terms of Use because they are the ones who create it. So if YouTube decides you need to sacrifice a lamb to watch a new Mr. Beast video, better sharpen your knife.

But it seems that just like powerful viruses make their own immune system stronger by adaptation, YouTube made ad blockers stronger.

Ad blockers felt the initial impact, but it didn’t kill them. For example, AdGuard reports only a short wave of uninstalls that lasted for about a month. After that, the number of installs returned to normal.

After a short period of adjustment, software like uBlockOrigin or AdBlockerPlus continued working on YouTube as intended. 

Some users experienced slowdowns in the YouTube performance, but that’s about it. As I’m writing this text, ad blockers block YouTube ads on my side account (Premium user here hehehe) just fine.

What’s even more interesting is that you can install both from Chrome’s main extension page. 

But what about the scary Manifest v3? Technically, it should cripple ad blockers for good. Except it doesn’t, as proved by fresh Firefox version 109, which has Manifest v3 enabled by default. 

But don’t cheer up just yet. Mozilla’s version of the protocol allows the WebRequestAPI (unlike Google’s), so we still don’t know how Google’s solution is going to work out.

Lesson # 3. There Is No Compromise for Everyone

It’s quite ironic to research the negative opinions on YouTube stopping ad blockers on the websites that ask to turn off ad blockers or videos (on YouTube!!!) that have ad insertion enabled💀

As our avid readers know, we don’t support greedy corporations, but our main point is that no solution fits everybody’s interests. Speaking of which, let’s speculate on the Internet’s most popular suggestions. 

Solution 1. Make YouTube free of ads again

As discussed before, that is simply utopic. Eliminating ad support would put YouTube straight into the grave at this point. Maybe Alphabet should decrease the number of ads shown, but we all know capitalism doesn’t work that way.

Solution 2. Start using alternatives

What’s quite peculiar is that the majority of YouTube users don’t really care about the service alternatives. The best-case scenario is one month of elevated interest before fading into the abyss. A 5-minute scrolling session through Google Trends would be enough to prove that.

DTube

Vimeo

Peertube

Solution 3. Buy Premium

Despite Internet noise, most consumers just do that. The number of subscribers keeps growing annually. We understand why people are mad about paying yet another subscription, but at least it’s not as bad as paying for storage.

Solution 4. Stop using YouTube

Did you know that YouTube scrolling has proved to be an addiction? More and more people (me included) don’t imagine their daily life without spending several hours on the platform daily. 

Other social media are no better, but it’d be great for each of us to stop consuming information and start living again… 

Solution 5. Solve YouTube’s advertising problems first

The most reasonable solution out of all is for YouTube to make their service good enough and deal with ad blocking afterward. What people mean by that is decreasing the number of scammy advertisements that regularly appear on the platform.

Apparently, Google’s internal filters don’t work as intended and leave a solid amount of “Elon Musk promises success,” crypto-scams, and unlicensed betting in their programmatic ads. 

YouTube does fight false advertising, but as the number of advertisers grows, the platform can’t keep up (or doesn’t want to) with checking each and every one of them.

The War Never Changes…

As you can see, the situation is far more complicated than “bad corporation does bad stuff.” We can’t justify YouTube’s actions, but some noise around the problem seems too loud and infantile. 

What we, as a community, should really address is YouTube’s internal problems, new ways of content monetization that don’t rely on ads so heavily, and the negative impact of social media on our psyche. Don’t follow the crowd; make your own opinions and stay informed with Epom!