YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

It's not their content though. Most people upload stuff without any intent to monetize or otherwise control it. YT, like other large sites, was built through mass-scale theft of what was supposed to be public domain works.

Sure it's their servers, but then it's their fault they don't allow redistribution via third party channels.

Some creators do put in fairly natural ad breaks, since there is an option to manually define where to run ads. RedLetterMedia is the best example that comes to mind; they get to a stopping point and cut to black and then an ad plays, and then they cut back afterwards. If you’re paying for Premium or otherwise blocking ads, it just looks like a segment transition.

The problem is that YouTube has on several occasions actually gone in and added huge numbers of additional automatic ad breaks, showing at random places in the video, and has stated that the “opt-out” is YouTubers manually going in and deleting those new ad breaks for every single video.[1] Most YouTubers don’t care enough to spend the time to manually fix it for every video, or just accept the excuse of “oh, but you get more revenue this way” and don’t bother. So then baking in smooth ad transitions becomes retroactively useless since YouTube is just running ads at random points in the video anyway.

[1]: https://twitter.com/redlettermedia/status/111398430485249228...

> I grew up changing the channel on TV when ads came on, and ripping adverts out of magazines before sitting down to read them.

Roger that. Always turning over a full-page ad to verify that no content text would be lost.

And then there's the magazines that put the ads on right-hand pages and the content on left-hand pages.

> Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter or maybe an animated GIF banner with 3 frames

There were programs way back then that acted as a proxy server that would remove image tags that matched the size used by banner ads. See WebWasher or Proxomitron.

We can also look at pirating as another reasoning.

Music pirating happened because it was simply impossible to get a lot of music you wanted to. Then when you could find it, you'd pay a large amount. Maybe not even knowing if you liked the work. Napster and Limewire come in because they let you get whatever and even one song at a time. Music industry comes in with DRM and makes it harder to rip CDs, but the mouse always wins. Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify killed a lot of music pirating because they offered most of the advantages that pirating had: access and portability. It made things easy.

Or look at movies. The "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad started in 2004, when a ticket cost under $10 (I think I paid around $6-$8). Now that same ticket is $18-$20, which is $11-$13 in 2004. Not to mention the crazy prices for refreshments. People didn't stop liking going to the movie theaters, they were priced out (along with the studios migrating towards international audiences and diverging from our cultural standards to theirs). Home streaming didn't fix that because they charged the same price or more for a ticket. Netflix killed a lot because people would rather wait (and especially after they started making their own content). Then more streaming services popped up and pirating is back because it re-simplified things. PopcornTime was incredibly popular for a bit and was simple enough for my grandma to use.

This is all really due to incredibly short sighted thinking. Chasing one marker to the next not realizing that they're veering away from the actual goal. I know this link isn't exactly the same thing, but we should be able to see the parallels here because it is the exact same game going on[0], just with profit maximization rather than policy making (we can formulate markets as a social choice theory problem).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQ4ii-zBMw