What's the advantage for google of doing this move? People "savy" enough to install an adblock (or even know that it exists) is most likely to switch to a competitor that allows for adblocking
Google has gone to absolute shit. Unless you let them stick their hand down your pants and fondle you, you can't even use their search engine with out getting hit with a captcha so they can use browser fingerprinting to track you. We were all hearded into the slaughter house and they are just now starting up the kill machines.
Mhm, I see that point, although I find it concerning given that the quality of the UX platforms like youtube has kept a consistent decline over the past decade. It feels like google keeps amassing more and more reasons for people to enable adblockers but I also understand youtube needs to be a profitable business and at some point you need to show ads
True, these are the challenges of freeware, ads are required unless you pay or become a pirate.
Youtubers/social media now mostly have promotions within videos, so we went back to how cable functions.
Thoughts on Social media/Rumble/twitter and other video platforms will evolve over time?
I think Alphabet (Google) will keep doing things that make people leave there other platforms, youtube will take a while so changes will be more gradual.
As a small note, in an unexpected turn of events, that "sponsor block" extension popped up also blocking promotions, I find it incredibly amazing that blocking ads can even go that further
I can't put my finger on it, but somehow I feel like youtube is irreplaceable, I don't say this out of some internet patriotism, I just think the initial momentum of inertia really has to be massive to make it budge, while with fediverse-stuff you can gradually generate content and maybe some people will be attracted (?)
And twitter's trajectory is to fucking weird and unpredictable right now that I just have no clue 🙃🙃🙃
TikTok is definitely hitting for certain demographics, but YouTube is still king in the long form department and I don't see that changing unless they completely alienate their watchers and creators or someone comes along and offers significantly more money (to creators).
It won't be a change no one notices though. Even non-savvy people who use ad-blockers are obviously going to notice that the internet suddenly became a significantly terrible experience.
The way things are going with data collection and advertising, the EU is bound to put heavy restrictions on it, basically killing the market Google is built on. They are trying to find a middle ground between banning data collection and full on everything being collected you do online, and if ad blockers just happen to die in the crossfire, it's not Google's concern.
They have the Trust API changes they are trying to push, which I believe they may try to make websites only support browsers using that API. They have a largest user base already so they have some sway, if Chrome won't load your webpage, you business might be dead.
Couple that with their anti ad blocking extension, users have to use Chrome to access webpages and can't block ads on those pages.
Mildly tinfoil-hatty, but I think within the realm of possibility.