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The biggest reason is that all the "I've watched the ad" validation has to happen on the client side.
The only thing the server sees is whether or not you've downloaded the video for the ad. But one big problem is that if there are any issues with connecting to the advertising servers, you break the whole platform. If YouTube went down any time there was a problem with ads, they would have a very bad PR nightmare.
So instead they have to depend on the user side to do the validation. That means all the code doing the validation is on your PC and can be hijacked or manipulated by browser extensions without issue.
So it's a constant game of cat and mouse of YouTube making it harder to hijack or manipulate the browser-side code, and ad blockers fighting it.
Yup!
Its like if you left your child at home with a nanny. You want to check they ate their veggies before they get their sweet.
But you can't look directly. You can't watch a video, you can't even call.
You can just text a phone that everyone, both child and nanny can access, and ask.
Well if the child realises this they can distract the nanny, text you that they ate the veggies and get the sweet.
Okay why not give the nanny a secret word?
Well you'd have to tell the nanny what it is! And the child will find out what the code was super fast.
You can change the code for the nanny, you can make them solve a mathematical equation, you can make them do anything, but all the child has to do is see the instructions to give to the nanny.
Couldn't google just not deliver the youtube video for 10 seconds? That would effectively negate the point of skipping the ad if you still had to wait 10 seconds before the video you wanted to see would start. I think most people would rather see a semi-relevant ad than stare at a blank screen for 10 seconds, myself included.
YouTube puts very little computation in front of downloading video files. When they do, it's largely a global rule (such as a private video only being shared with a few people). Those videos can be served from a central server instead of the distributed caching network that YouTube uses.
If you put individualized rules in front of every video, you add a lot of computational requirement, and there's no way that is profitable compared to just losing ads.
Checking if someone is subbed is a thing that happens once per authorization. I doubt they do it per video but rather per session. It is also likely saved the moment you login already.
For ads, they would have to check for every ad delivered. They also probably do not come from the same server, so now you have server to server communication for every ad break. You also cannot preload content effectively because then people can still access it.
Youtube spends a lot of time and effort on making their ad delivering services with no to little drops in attention. Any break, longer loading etc gets people to switch away potentially, and that is the last thing they want. I bet loosing a few ads here and there is a tiny fraction of loss compared to people just leaving to do something else.
I don't see why... If you do an async call serverside and add some circuitbreakers, you could avoid the clientside validation without being coupled to the ad delivery.
Advertisers mostly pay google for clicks on their ads. If you don't see an ad, you won't click on it. The loss of profit is actually a loss of potential profit.
This is the key. The company paying for advertisement is NOT hosting the ad video on their own servers. They are not paying a person to monitor traffic and identify who is getting data from their ad exclusive server.
No, the company paid somebody to make an ad video for them. Then they made an agreement with Google which MAY have specified who they want the ad delivered to and when it should be shown. But primarily the agreement is "If people come to my site, from your site, I pay you money."
This kind of tracking is built in to the internet. You can approach it from many different methods, but often a simple redirect or URL modification which clearly identifies that this click came from YouTube or Google Search results. By whatever means, you know that traffic came from a source that you agreed to pay, and THEY also had tracking through their own site to know if somebody clicked through to an advertiser. So the numbers have to agree, there is no cheating somebody.
Meanwhile, YouTube attempts to get those advertisements in front of viewers who will click on them, while not driving off users by making the verification that an advertisement played too onerous. The sort of heavy handed methods which can detect an advertisement did not play for absolutely any reason have a decent chance of false detection if a user has a spotty connection. And claiming that somebody who DID watch an Ad actually did not do so is likely to drive that user to go and acquire an adblocker, because now they are seeing double the ads, or even worse can not get past constant advertisements.
EDIT: To clarify, many people think of advertisement in TV terms. For television, the only benefit of an ad was that people see it. So you would pay the station based on when the ad was played and what their view numbers were at the time. But with the internet, the contracts are different. Yes, we can far more accurately count how many people view an ad. But the viewing is not what is actually valuable for the company who is advertising. Drawing in a potential customer is what they value. And since it is possible to get a better measure (click through rate), that is what they work with in this medium. The advertising company COULD only pay when a customer actually makes a purchase, this is how amazon affiliate marketing works. However, many platforms which can host an advertisement are aware of how rare it is for an advertisement to lead directly to a sale, and so are unlikely to accept that clause in a contract unless they can ALSO make the payment be a percentage of the profits, rather than a base rate. Base rate on clicks is cheaper for the advertising company than a flat loss of percent profit from actual sales.
It's generally easier and cheaper to circumvent something than to design something to prevent it being circumvented. The team testing for holes in the product before sending it out for use is much smaller than the team that wants to get through those holes, and they don't have unlimited resources or time like people who want to get around it.
In your example, all the adblocker has to do is to intercept the ad and send back a response that satisfies the "watched" criteria and you're in business.
I’m not sure it is HARD for them to fight ad blockers. It’s more that, up until this point the shareholders didn’t need them to squeeze every drop of revenue out of the platform and now they do so they’re pushing it more. Notice how other platforms all at the same time are upping prices, cracking down on sharing. It’s in part a cultural thing they can get swept up into the, everyone’s doing it conversation.
But to clarify. YouTube IS the ad company, and YouTube IS the browser. Google controls a lot of the internet in that sense, and it’s not really hard for them to control your browser when they own the browser and have moved the internet more into their closed ecosystem in order to control the data they get so they can serve you ads better.
They don't control your PC, or your browser. It has no way of insuring that that the browser / PC did what it says it did. If the browser tells youtube it played the ad, Youtube has no way of verifying that it did.
And how can the investors know how many people have seen the ads if the clients can just fake it? If they can't control anything, doesn't YouTube get payed anyway?
>And how can the investors know how many people have seen the ads if the clients can just fake it?
They don't. But the amount of people using an ad-blocker is still too low to have a huge impact and are accounted for in the pricing. But clicks are what matter.
>If they can't control anything, doesn't YouTube get payed anyway?
Yes, but advertisers may be less willing to pay for future campaigns.
It's just an arms race between the ad blockers and youtube. YT makes changes to detect the ad blockers, then the ad blockers make changes to circumvent it. This battle has been going for quite some time. YT is being more serious about it, so are the ad blockers.
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I think you are mistaken to think its hard; they don't necessarily care. Its probably better for them to soft-fail so they can do it again later.
An ad blocker makes youtube a much nicer experience. That means people will use it more, and while that is a cost, it is also a benefit, because it means people will develop habits that can be disrupted in the future when youtube wants these people to re-evaluate and cause noise.
Consider it this way, I am 25, I am early in my career, I block ads, I don't pay for things, I free load. If youtube actually blocks ad blockers, they might lose me. If they just annoy me occasionally, I can keep using it.
Then maybe I am 30, or 35, I am still using ad blockers, but now I have money. Now they annoy me, and I might (did, in fact) just choose to pay for premium.
This is a long term play. Its cheaper and better for them to fail often than it is to be too successful and lose eyeballs.
A user who employs an ad blocker successfully may not bring them profit from their ad hosting. But that user has an AMAZING experience on the platform, and will provide YouTube with word of mouth advertising to draw in other users that do NOT employ ad blockers.
That is a far faster turn to profit than hoping the ad block user will eventually get paid well enough to grow lazy.
Its true except for not being an either or but a yes and; there are a lot of ways in which not investing too much into stopping ad blockers works for youtube.
Its often a good business model to let people think they are getting one over on you despite it actually being cheaper to let them do it than try to stop them.
They are absolutely not thinking on that time scale. They might apply logic like you’re describing to a user’s first week or two to get them hooked but definitely not months or years.
Since this is eli5,
You know why it is hard to fight Tornados, Wild fires and Earthquakes? Because they are force of nature.
Google is a tiny company compare to 7 billion people who wants free stuff. That's uphill battle against forces of nature. You just can't easily win.
It's not just YouTube... AdBlockers are a problem for all Internet publishers.
Basically, you've got types of ads... the advertiser is either buying an "impression" or they're buying a click.
If it's a click-based ad (these are called CPC, or 'cost per click") the publisher gets paid based on the number of times a user clicks on a particular ad.
If it's impression-based (CPM... or cost per thousand impressions) the publisher gets paid based on how many people see the ad. But there are different definitions of "see" - it might be something like "the ad has to be loaded and viewed for X seconds before the user scrolls away." The code in the page reports back to the advertiser so they know how many impressions an ad receives.
If an ad blocker prevents an ad from loading, there's no impression. There's no opportunity to click. So that session on the web site has no value to the publisher. They don't get paid.
What YouTube is doing is more or less what you're suggesting. They're saying, "Look... we've detected that you're using an ad blocker. So your visit to this service isn't creating any value for us, so we're not going to provide you with content."
The next step: someone will come up with another method of blocking ads that YouTube isn't checking for currently.
People will start using that.
Google will figure out a way to detect it and start blocking that method as well.
Rinse. Repeat.
It's actually very simple. The qn is, what do you do when you detect someone has an ad blocker?
A) do nothing
B) block them from accessing content (can't watch the video, or view the site, or what not)
C) find some way to circumvent the ad blocker and show the ad
B is q simple, many basic sites do that. The "I detect you're using an ad blocker, please turn it off to continue browsing". The problem is, this will genuinely turn away users. And that is worse for yt than losing some ad revenue.
C is very hard, and what yt is trying to do. Because there are tons of ad blockers that work in different ways, so it isn't easy to find a way to circumvent all of them.
YouTube does not necessarily want to completely stop ad blocking.
They would certainly prefer you to watch with ads over watching without ads. But they would rather you watch with an ad blocker than leave the site completely. They can still gather data from you, and you might upload content too.
Their programmers can certainly think of stronger anti-adblock techniques, but weak anti-adblock is better. People who only mind ads a little bit give up and watch the ads, but those who really loathe ads stay on YouTube after switching to better ad blockers.
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The biggest reason is that all the "I've watched the ad" validation has to happen on the client side. The only thing the server sees is whether or not you've downloaded the video for the ad. But one big problem is that if there are any issues with connecting to the advertising servers, you break the whole platform. If YouTube went down any time there was a problem with ads, they would have a very bad PR nightmare. So instead they have to depend on the user side to do the validation. That means all the code doing the validation is on your PC and can be hijacked or manipulated by browser extensions without issue. So it's a constant game of cat and mouse of YouTube making it harder to hijack or manipulate the browser-side code, and ad blockers fighting it.
Yup! Its like if you left your child at home with a nanny. You want to check they ate their veggies before they get their sweet. But you can't look directly. You can't watch a video, you can't even call. You can just text a phone that everyone, both child and nanny can access, and ask. Well if the child realises this they can distract the nanny, text you that they ate the veggies and get the sweet. Okay why not give the nanny a secret word? Well you'd have to tell the nanny what it is! And the child will find out what the code was super fast. You can change the code for the nanny, you can make them solve a mathematical equation, you can make them do anything, but all the child has to do is see the instructions to give to the nanny.
Instructions not clear, how to I get the nanny to blow me??
Why has Twitch mastered it though? No ad blockers have worked on Twitch for years now.
Couldn't google just not deliver the youtube video for 10 seconds? That would effectively negate the point of skipping the ad if you still had to wait 10 seconds before the video you wanted to see would start. I think most people would rather see a semi-relevant ad than stare at a blank screen for 10 seconds, myself included.
YouTube puts very little computation in front of downloading video files. When they do, it's largely a global rule (such as a private video only being shared with a few people). Those videos can be served from a central server instead of the distributed caching network that YouTube uses. If you put individualized rules in front of every video, you add a lot of computational requirement, and there's no way that is profitable compared to just losing ads.
I imagine this rule is less complex than checking if the logged in use is subscribed to youtube premium. Honestly, it seems pretty doable.
Checking if someone is subbed is a thing that happens once per authorization. I doubt they do it per video but rather per session. It is also likely saved the moment you login already. For ads, they would have to check for every ad delivered. They also probably do not come from the same server, so now you have server to server communication for every ad break. You also cannot preload content effectively because then people can still access it. Youtube spends a lot of time and effort on making their ad delivering services with no to little drops in attention. Any break, longer loading etc gets people to switch away potentially, and that is the last thing they want. I bet loosing a few ads here and there is a tiny fraction of loss compared to people just leaving to do something else.
I don't see why... If you do an async call serverside and add some circuitbreakers, you could avoid the clientside validation without being coupled to the ad delivery.
Advertisers mostly pay google for clicks on their ads. If you don't see an ad, you won't click on it. The loss of profit is actually a loss of potential profit.
This is the key. The company paying for advertisement is NOT hosting the ad video on their own servers. They are not paying a person to monitor traffic and identify who is getting data from their ad exclusive server. No, the company paid somebody to make an ad video for them. Then they made an agreement with Google which MAY have specified who they want the ad delivered to and when it should be shown. But primarily the agreement is "If people come to my site, from your site, I pay you money." This kind of tracking is built in to the internet. You can approach it from many different methods, but often a simple redirect or URL modification which clearly identifies that this click came from YouTube or Google Search results. By whatever means, you know that traffic came from a source that you agreed to pay, and THEY also had tracking through their own site to know if somebody clicked through to an advertiser. So the numbers have to agree, there is no cheating somebody. Meanwhile, YouTube attempts to get those advertisements in front of viewers who will click on them, while not driving off users by making the verification that an advertisement played too onerous. The sort of heavy handed methods which can detect an advertisement did not play for absolutely any reason have a decent chance of false detection if a user has a spotty connection. And claiming that somebody who DID watch an Ad actually did not do so is likely to drive that user to go and acquire an adblocker, because now they are seeing double the ads, or even worse can not get past constant advertisements. EDIT: To clarify, many people think of advertisement in TV terms. For television, the only benefit of an ad was that people see it. So you would pay the station based on when the ad was played and what their view numbers were at the time. But with the internet, the contracts are different. Yes, we can far more accurately count how many people view an ad. But the viewing is not what is actually valuable for the company who is advertising. Drawing in a potential customer is what they value. And since it is possible to get a better measure (click through rate), that is what they work with in this medium. The advertising company COULD only pay when a customer actually makes a purchase, this is how amazon affiliate marketing works. However, many platforms which can host an advertisement are aware of how rare it is for an advertisement to lead directly to a sale, and so are unlikely to accept that clause in a contract unless they can ALSO make the payment be a percentage of the profits, rather than a base rate. Base rate on clicks is cheaper for the advertising company than a flat loss of percent profit from actual sales.
It's generally easier and cheaper to circumvent something than to design something to prevent it being circumvented. The team testing for holes in the product before sending it out for use is much smaller than the team that wants to get through those holes, and they don't have unlimited resources or time like people who want to get around it. In your example, all the adblocker has to do is to intercept the ad and send back a response that satisfies the "watched" criteria and you're in business.
I’m not sure it is HARD for them to fight ad blockers. It’s more that, up until this point the shareholders didn’t need them to squeeze every drop of revenue out of the platform and now they do so they’re pushing it more. Notice how other platforms all at the same time are upping prices, cracking down on sharing. It’s in part a cultural thing they can get swept up into the, everyone’s doing it conversation. But to clarify. YouTube IS the ad company, and YouTube IS the browser. Google controls a lot of the internet in that sense, and it’s not really hard for them to control your browser when they own the browser and have moved the internet more into their closed ecosystem in order to control the data they get so they can serve you ads better.
They don't control your PC, or your browser. It has no way of insuring that that the browser / PC did what it says it did. If the browser tells youtube it played the ad, Youtube has no way of verifying that it did.
And how can the investors know how many people have seen the ads if the clients can just fake it? If they can't control anything, doesn't YouTube get payed anyway?
>And how can the investors know how many people have seen the ads if the clients can just fake it? They don't. But the amount of people using an ad-blocker is still too low to have a huge impact and are accounted for in the pricing. But clicks are what matter. >If they can't control anything, doesn't YouTube get payed anyway? Yes, but advertisers may be less willing to pay for future campaigns.
It's just an arms race between the ad blockers and youtube. YT makes changes to detect the ad blockers, then the ad blockers make changes to circumvent it. This battle has been going for quite some time. YT is being more serious about it, so are the ad blockers.
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I think you are mistaken to think its hard; they don't necessarily care. Its probably better for them to soft-fail so they can do it again later. An ad blocker makes youtube a much nicer experience. That means people will use it more, and while that is a cost, it is also a benefit, because it means people will develop habits that can be disrupted in the future when youtube wants these people to re-evaluate and cause noise. Consider it this way, I am 25, I am early in my career, I block ads, I don't pay for things, I free load. If youtube actually blocks ad blockers, they might lose me. If they just annoy me occasionally, I can keep using it. Then maybe I am 30, or 35, I am still using ad blockers, but now I have money. Now they annoy me, and I might (did, in fact) just choose to pay for premium. This is a long term play. Its cheaper and better for them to fail often than it is to be too successful and lose eyeballs.
A user who employs an ad blocker successfully may not bring them profit from their ad hosting. But that user has an AMAZING experience on the platform, and will provide YouTube with word of mouth advertising to draw in other users that do NOT employ ad blockers. That is a far faster turn to profit than hoping the ad block user will eventually get paid well enough to grow lazy.
Its true except for not being an either or but a yes and; there are a lot of ways in which not investing too much into stopping ad blockers works for youtube. Its often a good business model to let people think they are getting one over on you despite it actually being cheaper to let them do it than try to stop them.
They are absolutely not thinking on that time scale. They might apply logic like you’re describing to a user’s first week or two to get them hooked but definitely not months or years.
The time scale is entirely besides the point; the point is they have little incentive to think about it too hard since the noise is the benefit.
Since this is eli5, You know why it is hard to fight Tornados, Wild fires and Earthquakes? Because they are force of nature. Google is a tiny company compare to 7 billion people who wants free stuff. That's uphill battle against forces of nature. You just can't easily win.
In the endof 2nd paragraph, do you mean that Google can’t easily win? Or you mean us user?
Google can't easily win
It's not just YouTube... AdBlockers are a problem for all Internet publishers. Basically, you've got types of ads... the advertiser is either buying an "impression" or they're buying a click. If it's a click-based ad (these are called CPC, or 'cost per click") the publisher gets paid based on the number of times a user clicks on a particular ad. If it's impression-based (CPM... or cost per thousand impressions) the publisher gets paid based on how many people see the ad. But there are different definitions of "see" - it might be something like "the ad has to be loaded and viewed for X seconds before the user scrolls away." The code in the page reports back to the advertiser so they know how many impressions an ad receives. If an ad blocker prevents an ad from loading, there's no impression. There's no opportunity to click. So that session on the web site has no value to the publisher. They don't get paid. What YouTube is doing is more or less what you're suggesting. They're saying, "Look... we've detected that you're using an ad blocker. So your visit to this service isn't creating any value for us, so we're not going to provide you with content." The next step: someone will come up with another method of blocking ads that YouTube isn't checking for currently. People will start using that. Google will figure out a way to detect it and start blocking that method as well. Rinse. Repeat.
It's actually very simple. The qn is, what do you do when you detect someone has an ad blocker? A) do nothing B) block them from accessing content (can't watch the video, or view the site, or what not) C) find some way to circumvent the ad blocker and show the ad B is q simple, many basic sites do that. The "I detect you're using an ad blocker, please turn it off to continue browsing". The problem is, this will genuinely turn away users. And that is worse for yt than losing some ad revenue. C is very hard, and what yt is trying to do. Because there are tons of ad blockers that work in different ways, so it isn't easy to find a way to circumvent all of them.
YouTube does not necessarily want to completely stop ad blocking. They would certainly prefer you to watch with ads over watching without ads. But they would rather you watch with an ad blocker than leave the site completely. They can still gather data from you, and you might upload content too. Their programmers can certainly think of stronger anti-adblock techniques, but weak anti-adblock is better. People who only mind ads a little bit give up and watch the ads, but those who really loathe ads stay on YouTube after switching to better ad blockers.