Dear YouTube: It Won't Work

YouTube's attempts to ban adblockers have failed, and as such, they're now attempting to make them simply useless on their platform. That's right, YouTube is beginning to roll out server-side ads, injected directly into the video stream, theoretically impossible to be blocked. I don't think I need to point out that this is an obvious violation of the right of the user to customize their experience with the platform, or that the difficulty of customizing server-side ads means the chances of YouTube serving skanky (or sometimes borderline pornographic) ads to minors just increased, or that it's being done in the interests of executives and shareholders, not creators. You know all of that already (and if you didn't, you do now). It's a bad move on YouTube's part that will only continue Big Tech's abusive relationship with the American public.

People are already suggesting workarounds for the future. A leading candidate is getting a good VPN and setting your location to Myanmar, where YouTube doesn't serve ads. As good an idea as that is, honestly, I don't think we should give up on adblockers. Mark my words: by the year's end, at least one big-name adblocker will successfully bypass the server-side ads. My money's on uBlock Origin, who are apparently chugging along with the problem already. When they figure it out, I'm saying buh-bye to Ghostery, that's for sure.

Tech companies seem to forget that there is always a Jerry to their proverbial Tom. Just look at Denuvo. When the DRM software was released, the entire video game industry embraced it with smugs on their mugs, thinking they had finally defeated those pirates once and for all. And for a while, it seemed like they did. Denuvo is, after all, an incredibly complex piece of software that requires high-level skills in multiple field in order to break.

Fast forward a few years, and there is now a tiny, elite group of people who are able to crack Denuvo. No matter how small the group is, the fact that it exists means something: no matter what tech companies do to control us, someone is always there to break the chains.

Much like gaming companies underestimated the iron will of people who don't want to pay for video games, I feel YouTube is underestimating the iron will of people who don't want to watch ads. They might be surprised how far adblocker technology has gone solely fueled off of hatred for YouTube's ads. And I think they might be surprised how far it will continue to go off of the same gas. I am not convinced that any piece of corporate crapware can stand up to a group of highly-caffeinated code monkeys that don't want to be sold something everywhere they look.

So my advice to YouTube is this: give up. Remove the adblock detector. Keep the ads client-side. You are only going to get defeated on this path. Either uBlock Origin will catch up with you, or the sales of various VPNs will mysteriously jump. Take the path of least embarrassment. Trust me on this one