TL;DW: the ads will be in the video stream itself which will mess up timestamps, sponsor block uses timestamps to know when the ads are.
Seems to me that this will also break every other use case of specific times like direct linking to a timestamp of a video, right?
I’d imagine YouTube subtracts the ad length from posted timestamps when clicking a link containing one. But we are taking about Google, soooooo…
If Google can do that then hopefully sponsor block can too!
In the cat and mouse game, the cat can adjust tactics but the mice eventually figure out an alternative route. I’m sure they will find a way with this. Either that or a lot of people will just stop watching YouTube, I’d imagine.
A truly shocking number of people don’t use any form of adblock. I doubt that driving off the adblock users will have a significant effect on viewership (and even if it does, why would Google care, it’s not like we’re making them money).
There’s also plenty of people that do use adblock today, and would just put up with ads if it stopped working.
So the actual number of people that would simply stop using YouTube altogether is lower than the number of people that use adblock today.
And from YouTube’s perspective, those people aren’t contributing revenue anyways, and all they get is a little bit of usage data. Easy trade.
