- YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers, integrating ads directly into videos to make them indistinguishable from the main content.
- This new method complicates ad blocking, including tools like SponsorBlock, which now face challenges in accurately identifying and skipping sponsored segments.
- The feature is currently in testing and not widely rolled out, with YouTube encouraging users to subscribe to YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.
So much effort, dev time and resources just to fight users to make the experience worse and push them to alternatives to squeeze out the tiniest margin of extra ad money. Plus I’m sure this’ll be countered almost immediately. I’d be shocked if ad blockers took more than a few days to find a way to detect and neuter these ads.
This is some accelerated enshittification.