YouTube continues its efforts to circumvent ad blockers. Earlier this week, adblocker SponsorBlock was released Posted that tests Google's video service server-side ad injection with a limited number of users.
Essentially, this means that the ad is injected into the video before it arrives on your device (unlike client-side ad injection, where the ads arrive on your device separately), making it harder for software to detect the ad and to block. .
“This breaks the sponsor block, because now all timestamps are offset by the ad times,” SponsorBlock said.
A Google spokesperson appeared to confirm the test a statementwrites that the service “improves performance and reliability when serving both organic and advertising video content,” with an update that “may result in suboptimal viewing experiences for viewers with ad blockers installed.”
Google reiterated its position that ad blockers “violate YouTube's terms of service” and that viewers who want an ad-free experience should sign up for YouTube Premium.
This is just the latest step in an ongoing battle as YouTube continually finds new ways to get around ad blockers and then the ad blockers try to adapt. The company even rolled out a pop-up message last year that prevented visitors from watching videos on YouTube unless they had turned off their ad blockers.
When I spoke to the companies behind various ad blockers Last fall, Ghostery's product and engineering director Krzysztof Modras told me that “YouTube, as one of the largest publishers in the world, is continually investing in ad blocking bypass” and that it “seems to be adapting [its] methods more often than ever before.”
More recently, an email from another ad blocker, AdGuard, suggested that while the server-side approach is new to YouTube on the web, the service is already doing something similar in its mobile apps.
AdGuard said it “remains optimistic that solutions will emerge, even if it will require concerted efforts and innovative approaches from ad blocking developers and the ad filtering community.”
