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YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don't turn off your ad-blocker
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Sorry Google.
I'm gonna use YouTube ad free or I won't use it.
And I ain't gonna pay for it.
That's fine, but that's why Google is doing this. They need people who won't watch ads to stop using it to lower their costs. I mean what business survives with zero income? The question google is asking isn't whether or not some people will stop using it, the question their asking is will enough of them stop for them to generate income.
This assumes that the biggest cost to Youtube is serving the content, not storing the content. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I think it's a valid question because if storage is the larger cost, then it doesn't matter how many visitors visit the site, Youtube is still warehousing all that content. By the way, in that scenario, it's actually better for Youtube to keep as many viewers on the site as possible, adblockers or not, because they can use higher viewer numbers to increase the price of the ad space they charge to advertisers.
A business that kills it's competitors by operating at a loss at first, and then jacks up its price once consumers have nowhere else to go.
How does that actually work when the advertisers know people aren't going to see the ad?
I think for a while, their strategy to ignore adblockers worked just fine. User counts were rising, ad payouts could be and would be cut, ads could be and would be placed in different parts of the video, videos that weren't monetized were getting ads thrown in just to make Youtube/Google/Adsense money. YT was pulling lots of levers to keep the value of advertising on the platform high.
That is, until Adpocalypse. My theory is, after this point, advertisers began to question how many more levers could be pulled until they addressed the elephant in the room, an elephant that was getting larger and larger: the adblockers. Let's be fair to Google (ugh), it would be much much easier to pull all those levers, than to tackle the technical challenge of stopping client-side software from running on their website. Once interest rates rose, and advertiser pressure reached it's current peak, Google started taking anti-adblocker actions: Manifest V3 to kill ublock on Chrome, Youtube's current system, etc.