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?
You could say they’ve won battles, but never any war against piracy.
They’ve made examples out of low-hanging fruit and are trying to legislate compete authority over copyright(they’d legislate parody if they could), but it just isn’t feasible.
Piracy is a decentralized, evolving amalgation of countless methods and technologies bent toward the relatively simple task of sharing media.
They can close down a website or fine a clueless teenager 200,000, But that has no effect on the desire to watch a movie or play a video game without betting your money that the production will be of value.
They very nearly beat piracy when there was basically only one streaming service, Netflix, and everything was on it.
Music piracy used to be the biggest thing and now no one pirates music anymore since there are one or two streaming services with essentially 100% of all the music available
Make going legit easier than piracy and piracy goes away
But unfortunately for the studios everyone wanted to get their own piece of the streaming revenues and fragmented the market. In a lot of ways it’s still better than the old cable tv system (everything on demand, no or at least fewer ads, higher quality programming) but the sheer amount of services someone needs in order to be able to watch everything (and even then it’s not 100%) is really turning people off.
If they’d all stuck with Netflix or whatever and every studio got on board there’d be basically no piracy now