this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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The second they seriously figure out ad blocking, everyone will figure out ways around it including the ytdownload app and Ublock Origin. This has already happened probably hundreds of times. There will never be a way to stop it because there are myriad ways around it.
They are approaching the issue from the wrong direction: They need to make the service better, not worse, and they will make more money! Steam/Valve is an excellent example of this because of their CEO's philosophy on "piracy", he views it as a service issue with the product itself instead of blaming people who are fed up with bad service and high prices.
Taking the approach of trying to extract more value out of customers ultimately kills the product, driving customers away and hurting profits compared to what they could have had if they'd just made a really great product with ads that aren't onerous, prices that are reasonable, as well as adequate compensation and treatment for the creators (nobody gets randomly demonitized on Steam because they featured a particular thing for example).
YouTube is not profitable, that is the number one problem. The infrastructure to keep it running costs billions per year, mainly in storage and bandwidth. Offering a better service won't bring money for two reasons:
1 - they don't have competition 2 - more people coming to YouTube will increase costs
Steam's running cost is nowhere near the cost of YouTube, plus it has several methods of generating income, unlike a "free video streaming platform"
What I've never been able to figure out is why they don't charge a small amount for storage. Letting people upload everything they want, as often as they want, in whatever resolution they want, and then keeping it forever is a fool's errand that drives the price of yt-premium up through the roof.
There's no lack of content makers, so it's not that they can't draw more people to the network. There's no competition for them to battle. At scale, the disk costs them way less than the users have to pay locally,
They could easily charge creators a pittance to host their content and give it back to them once they reach a base number of followers.
Just because it has been that way in the past absolutely does not mean it works that way in the future.
What happens when they force login, then when they detect discrepancies in watch time vs watch + ad time and they ban your account?
What happens when they force ads to play before you get the main roll and simply don't send you any video streams for 5 minutes?
What happens when they force screen recording rights to make sure you're displaying ads on mobile devices?
What happens when they start using DRM and roll the encryption so often yt-dlp becomes useless?
The theoretical myriad isn't any bigger than their theoretical ways to break that myriad, but the catch is that they're funded.
There are LOTS of ways they could shut it down that are beyond checking agents and changing API's around.
They pull that wild bullshit and users will drop like flies lol, AND there would STILL be ways around it both in terms of tech/coding as well as old fashioned methods.