YouTube has been going very hard against ad blockers in recent times, with news of more measures on that front in the past year than ever before. In another form of innovation in pushing ads through to viewers, the company may be injecting ads server-side, instead of the current method of having a separate segment interrupting a video.
This was discovered, a little ironically, by SponsorBlock, the crowdsourced extension that skips sponsored segments of YouTube videos. Posting on its official account on X, formerly Twitter, the makers of the add-on notes that this results in the duration of the ad being added to the length of videos you may be trying to watch. While this method of ad injection is claimed to be in testing, comments on a Reddit post regarding this has a few users claiming it has already affected their YouTube experience.
Naturally, if the ads are integrated into videos directly rather as a separate clip forcefully cutting into a currently playing video, it would bypass many ad blockers, or at least the way they currently work. This implementation of ads on YouTube specifically breaks SponsorBlock, as the extension works via community-submitted timestamps on videos. But if ads are added directly to videos, this naturally stops features based on timestamps from working.
For now, it remains to be seen if this will truly end ad blockers for good. From a GitHub post shared by SponsorBlock, this is the arms race swinging back in favour of YouTube, as ad blockers work towards making workarounds. SponsorBlock itself is also looking for ways to get its own extensions to work in the meantime. Of course, the surest way to never see ads is to fork up money for a Premium subscription.
(Source: SponsorBlock [1], [2], Reddit via 9to5Google)
