The YouTube administration, in an effort to expand the audience of Premium subscribers, has been waging a war with ad blockers for several years now, but the community is resisting with comparable energy. As a result, the tech giant was forced to stoop low enough to consider introducing server-level advertising, which could have serious consequences.
Unconventional Ad Blocking Methods
The unofficial YouTube Vanced app relied on a mechanism to intercept the platform’s broadcasts of original content in a familiar but ad-free interface. A newer implementation of the ReVanced project involves modifying the original YouTube application to integrate some of the features that a Premium subscription provides, including ad blocking. Achieving this goal is facilitated by the crowdsourcing project SponsorBlock, which allows viewers to scroll through native integration of sponsor advertising.
SponsorBlock users mark up the native integration in the video, the information is saved in a common repository, and other viewers safely skip the specified segments. However, Google’s next attempt could disrupt the operation of this well-oiled mechanism. As the SponsorBlock team reported on the X social network, the YouTube administration began experimenting with the implementation of server-side advertising. There’s not much information about this change, but it could apparently make time-stamped video links and chapter markers obsolete. At the same time, the YouTube platform itself will always know the duration of the advertising that it integrates, so it can adjust the timestamps accordingly, notes NIXSOLUTIONS.
Impact on Users and Future Outlook
Making advertising more complex is a necessary evil for YouTube’s business, which depends on advertising. Therefore, users suffering from it are recommended to resort to radical measures – for example, using a VPN with IP addresses of countries where there are no advertisements on YouTube. As developments continue, we’ll keep you updated on the latest changes and how they affect the viewing experience.