this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Baked in ads run counter to googles entire ad philosophy though, to say nothing of the technical challenges that poses. Googles big selling point right now is targeted ads where the ads they serve you are based on your activities that they've tracked. With baked in ads every viewer of that stream gets the same ads, so while they could traget ads based on the contents of the stream, they would no longer be able to target the ads at specific viewers.
There's also the problem that baked in ads are in many ways actually easier to skip. There are already extensions like sponsorblock that can skip specific segments of videos, and if it's not served as a separate stream it will be more difficult to give special treatment to the ad portion of the video.
Baked in personalized ads aren't impossible.
I can't remember which streaming service it was (I want to say Tubi?) But they had baked in personalized ads. The technology isn't far fetched and certainly possible with what youtube already has.
Sponsorblock only works on specific, known timed segments.
Say a video you want to watch has 8 places that YouTube can put up an ad (as determined by YouTube). Out of those 8 places, it decides to serve 5 ads. But the ads are of different lengths.
Sponsorblock can't block those ads.
I'm not saying people won't try but YouTube has all the information it needs to serve intrusive ads. And, I hate to say it, but they have the market dominance to pull the rug under premium subscribers feet because you know that in a year or two, they are going to start serving ads to those people too.
That's not true though, sponsorblock is user reported, that's why it works for sponsor segments and in-video ads of all lengths and locations in videos. If ads get baked into a video they can't be taken out or changed, since that's what getting "baked in" means in this context, and as soon as a single user reports the ad it will be blocked by sponsorblock for anyone who uses it. If it can be taken out or changed, then it's not truly baked in and that can be exploited.
As soon as on user does it? Welcome, DoS attack!