YouTube continues its efforts to circumvent ad blocks. Earlier this week, the ad blocker SponsorBlock was posted that the Google-owned video service is testing server-side ad injection with a limited number of users.
Essentially, this means that the ad is also injected into the video before it reaches your device (as opposed to client-side ad injection, where the ads reach your device separately), making it harder for software to detect and block the advertisement.
“This breaks sponsor blocking as now all timestamps are offset by ad times,” said SponsorBlock.
A Google spokesperson appeared to confirm the test a statementwriting that the service is “improving its performance and reliability in serving both organic and ad-supported 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 subscribe to YouTube Premium.
This is just the latest move in an ongoing battle, with YouTube constantly finding new ways to circumvent ad blockers and ad blockers then trying to adapt. In fact, the company rolled out a pop-up last year that effectively prevented visitors from watching YouTube videos unless they turned off ad blockers.
when I spoke to the companies behind several ad blockers last fall, Ghostery’s director of product and engineering, Krzysztof Modras, told me that “as one of the largest publishers in the world, YouTube is constantly investing in bypassing ad blocking” and that “it seems to be adapting [its] methods more often than ever.”
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 has already done something similar in its mobile apps.
AdGuard said it remains “optimistic that solutions will emerge, although they require concerted efforts and innovative approaches from ad-blocking developers and the ad-filtering community.”
