Inside the ‘arms race’ between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.::YouTube’s dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there’s an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.
I have some background in tech but admit I’m a long way out of touch now. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they’re working on back end stuff to have personalised ads “baked in”. I know the resource implications of this are huge, but it still wouldn’t surprise me.
The resource implications are the problem. The cost - in terms of compute time - to bake those ads eats into the profit earned from advertising as a whole. Since only a fraction of users adblock, they would probably lose more money than they gained.
They’ll consider it once the compute cost inserting the ads is low enough that it’s worth it. I have no idea if we’ve reached that point yet, but I’m guessing not, since otherwise they’d already be doing it.
Most of the formats served by YouTube are already chunked, which means they can easily insert different chunks of video (ads, etc) at various points in the stream by changing the manifest. This is trivial, computationally. The complexity lies in building the mechanisms to make it work.
The non-chunked formats are only used by older devices, and are lower quality. Those would require re-encoding to change, but few users see them anyway, and those users probably don’t adblock.
Platforms can now insert ads directly into the manifest file into totally random timestamps. The file chunks’ names follow the same pattern as the original video. You cannot filter or prepare for it. Probably that will be the future. (AWS MediaConvert can do this for example.)
And they only create the manifest file upon starting the stream so you can inject personalized ads too.