You may not realize it but we’re in the middle of a high stakes War not in the Middle East but right here in your browser

What’s at stake is a few precious seconds of your attention while staring at this magic glowing screen

It is November 24th, 2023 and you’re watching the code report. Back in June 2023, a small group of YouTube users were surprised to get this message cutting them off for having an ad blocker enabled, making them the first casualties of YouTube’s ad blocker blocker.

Because you’re just a material girl living in a material world, your attention is very valuable. It only takes a few seconds for a good advertisement to inject some information into your hippocampus, where it can then be transferred to the frontal lobe to manipulate your impulse control to get you to buy something you don’t need. By the way guys, Black Friday Cyber Monday sale is happening – buyers ship Pro 40% off. Learn to code and get a free t-shirt. Buy it now before the impulse fades from your prefrontal cortex – that’s an example of an honest advertisement that you should definitely take advantage of.

But most companies need to pay someone else to shill for them. In 2022, Alphabet, the company behind Google, generated $280 billion in revenue. Out of that, $224 billion is from advertisements. But of that $224 billion, only $29 billion comes from YouTube, which is only 11% of advertising revenue. Considering that YouTube is the second most popular website in the world, this number should be a lot higher. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram do a much better job of generating ad revenue. On top of that, YouTube is extremely expensive to operate. Streaming a video around the world with low latency requires massive data centers with CDNs all over the world. YouTube’s infrastructure is a technological marvel, and they offer it all for free in exchange for a little bit of your privacy and some real estate in your brain. However, this is unacceptable for many because it requires an invasion of privacy. Information might be collected about your browsing history, location, and demographics just to show you targeted advertisements. That’s kind of creepy – that’s the philosophical argument anyway. But mostly, ads are just annoying, and we should have the freedom to use the internet the way we want to.

Although, as a content creator myself, I could make the argument that adblock is theft. Whenever you watch an ad, 55% goes to me, with the other 45% going to the big guy. However, when someone goes to the Chrome web store and installs Ublock Origin, an open-source Chrome plugin used by 34 million other people, it uses a variety of techniques to block ads both on websites and YouTube. It will block Network requests that go to ad servers, analytics tools that collect data, and also blocks the JavaScript that’s responsible for displaying things like banner ads. Once installed, you can test it to make sure it’s working okay on websites like adblocktester.com. And because it’s all open source, you can see how everything works in the source code here on GitHub.

But now, you’re a filthy pirate stealing from honest creators like Logan Paul and SS Sniperwolf. And if you keep installing things like adblock, Adblock Plus, AdGuard, Ghostery, AdBlocker Ultimate, or use privacy-focused browsers like Brave, YouTube’s going to go out of business and take all of its creators with it – that’s the argument anyway. YouTube has been promoting its own ad blocker, YouTube Premium, and shares revenue from that product with YouTube creators. In full disclosure, I’ve been an affiliate for YouTube Premium in a past video and I currently use it myself. But there’s a significant number of people out there who you couldn’t pay to pay for the service, no matter how much advertising you tried to inject into their inboxes.

YouTube’s Crackdown on Ad Blockers

YouTube has been cracking down recently on ad blockers. If you have an ad blocker enabled, you may get a warning that video playback will be disabled if you don’t disable your ad blocker. In addition, the overall experience for ad block users will likely get worse in the future. A small group of users were noticing a 5-second delay before a video started playing, which is apparently part of YouTube’s efforts to detect ad blockers.

A bigger part of this war, though, comes down to Chrome extensions. When you build a Chrome extension, you have to have a manifest.json file. This file defines what the extension is allowed to do on the user’s behalf, like access network requests to block ads. If we look at the Manifest for Ublock Origin, you’ll first notice that it’s using manifest version 2. Then if we go down to permissions, you’ll notice it’s using web request and web request blocking. These APIs made it easy for an extension to intercept a network request and then modify it so it can’t display the ad it wants to. However, Manifest version 2 is being deprecated in favor of version 3, which replaces the web request API with the declarative net request API, which is far more limited when it comes to dynamically filtering content. What’s kind of funny is that Chrome actually might need ad blockers because, as recently as last Christmas, the FBI was recommending people install them to protect against malicious advertisements hosting ransomware.

Ultimately, I do think it’s possible that YouTube could eradicate ad blockers altogether, but currently, it’s a lot like when Barbara Streisand tried to suppress a photo of her house that almost nobody knew about, resulting in the opposite intended effect – making the photo extremely famous. We’re currently seeing the Streisand effect with ad blockers, where more and more people are learning about them and using them, despite the fact that they violate the terms of service. It’s also making the ad blockers become more sophisticated. It’s only a matter of time before someone invents an ad blocker blocker blocker that can block this ad blocker blocker, forcing YouTube to then invent its own ad blocker blocker blocker. At which point, this joke becomes too repetitive.

In Conclusion

This has been the code report. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.