I often see the sentiment that YouTube and adblockers will be forever locked in a cat-and-mouse game. However, for many years now, Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking on desktop web.
What is stopping YouTube from replicating Twitch’s advertising strategy of embedding ads directly into their videos?
YouTube can always win the war, at any time, they can turn off their servers
Everything else is just an arms race until YouTube decides it’s not worth participating anymore.
The war isnt about viewing YouTube, the war is YouTube as an exclusive video platform globally. As long as there’s no serious federated competitors to YouTube, we’re stuck with them, and we’re losing the war.
Weird definition of victory
YouTube doesn’t have to participate, so they can win in the sense that they don’t have to give anybody content if they don’t see a benefit. The world can’t compell YouTube to participate if they don’t want to.
By the same token a content creator strike would really hurt if it were large enough.
What a world it would be were that a possibility.
Sadly, I neither see a content creators’ union on the horizon anytime soon, nor do I see individual creators die a martyr’s death, financially speaking…
100%
Yeah, inside a week of them closing their servers I’ll see an absolute flood of users on platforms supporting LBRY (Peertube, anyone?) and that’ll be it. The day LTT and MKBHD go and say “Alright, we’ve had enough, they removed all of our content. We’re self-hosting it now” and do it, YouTube is dead beyond any semblance of hope.
So no, I’m not very worried.