The simplest solution is to embed the ads in the video stream.
Then people could fast forward past them.
I’d be fine with it, but advertisers won’t be happy until you’re forced to stand up, say “Mc Donald’s”, and then answer a short quiz about the ad that just played before you can continue.
They could block video scrubbing at ad markers. I’m not sure how easy that is to circumvent, but it’s probably harder than the current ad blockers, which just block network requests.
Anything that causes the video player to behave differently during the ad is a clear marker to ad blockers that “THERE IS AN AD HERE!”
The hardest thing to block would be just making the ad a direct part of the video, which behaves like the rest of the video. This would reduce the effectiveness of ad blockers filtering it out significantly, but then users would be able to skip ads they don’t want to watch and we can’t have that…
Yup, it would be so easy to do it in a way that is difficult for ad blockers to remove and doesn’t annoy the fuck out of the users, but it would allow users to manually skip them so they’re not going to do it.
Then people could fast forward past them.
I’d be fine with it, but advertisers won’t be happy until you’re forced to stand up, say “Mc Donald’s”, and then answer a short quiz about the ad that just played before you can continue.
They could block video scrubbing at ad markers. I’m not sure how easy that is to circumvent, but it’s probably harder than the current ad blockers, which just block network requests.
Anything that causes the video player to behave differently during the ad is a clear marker to ad blockers that “THERE IS AN AD HERE!”
The hardest thing to block would be just making the ad a direct part of the video, which behaves like the rest of the video. This would reduce the effectiveness of ad blockers filtering it out significantly, but then users would be able to skip ads they don’t want to watch and we can’t have that…
Yeah, you’re probably right. Randomly distributing it would also reduce the effectiveness of things like SponsorBlock.
Yup, it would be so easy to do it in a way that is difficult for ad blockers to remove and doesn’t annoy the fuck out of the users, but it would allow users to manually skip them so they’re not going to do it.