Check out Youtube’s new tactic to stop ad blockers

O Youtube It has already made it clear that it is willing to take strict measures to block third-party apps that violate its terms of service. Among these apps are the popular ad blockers.

For those who do not subscribe to the Youtube Premiumwhich costs R$24.90/month, the use of adblocks ends up working as a way to continue consuming content on the platform without your experience being interrupted repeatedly by ads inserted at certain points in the videos.

Google continues to carry out numerous tests, not just in terms of inserting advertisements, when videos are paused, but also ways to stop the actions of these apps that impact the platform’s revenue. The most recent measure to curb adblocks involves a new approach to data flow.

Ads in the same stream as the video could be the solution for Youtube

Youtube Premium subscribers are immune to advertising because these accounts do not receive data streams relating to advertisements from the platform. The same does not happen with users without a subscription. And that’s where Adblocks come into play, they can monitor and identify data flows.

When adblock detects a stream of ad data, it can block the loading request for that stream, preventing the ad from being displayed.

Open-source adblocks like SponsorBlock can be even more efficient in blocking, as they have an entire community that actively participates in helping to identify the timestamps of ads in videos. According to SponsorBlock, more than 450,000 users have reported more than 17 million ad streams.

In a post on its X account, SponsorBlock said that YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection. This means that the ad is inserted into the video stream

YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection. This means that the ad is being added directly into the video stream.

This breaks sponsorblock since now all timestamps are offset by the ad times.

— SponsorBlock (@[email protected]) (@SponsorBlock) June 12, 2024

With ads integrated into the main stream, it becomes much more difficult for adblock to distinguish and block advertising without also affecting the actual video content.

Sponsorblock says that for now, it has implemented a server-side check to detect when a user is submitting data from a browser where YouTube is using server-side ad injection. They are rejecting these submissions to prevent the database from being populated with incorrect timestamps.