I often see the sentiment that YouTube and adblockers will be forever locked in a cat-and-mouse game. However, for many years now, Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking on desktop web.
What is stopping YouTube from replicating Twitch’s advertising strategy of embedding ads directly into their videos?
Nope.
Piracy/adtech evasion is actually a very similar paradigm to infosec/security: you have to succeed all the time, always; the attackers/exploiters only have to succeed once, and there’s a lot more attackers than your company has employees, let alone security specialists.
What? They have to succeed every time also.
Nobody uses an adbloxker which blocks 1 ad
You’re not getting what I’m saying.
The definition of total success for people who are on the defensive side is to to block every possible exploit, always, without exception.
The definition of total success for people who are on the attacking side is to find one way around whatever the defense side has put in place once, and then they can get what they want.
I still think it’s not a comparable situation. Since winning once in afbloxking does not give you a permanent gain or anything like gaining access to a system would.
I’m speaking in general terms. It absolutely is analogous at a high level.
… What?
Youtube has to detect every type of adblocker.
Ublock origin only needs to find 1 way around their detection.
And even if ublock ever gets stumped, a thousand people are trying to find their own version of 1 way around detection.
Youtube is playing whack a mole against a thousand moles, and just one unbopped mole destroys their hammer and they need to go craft a new one from scratch.
The moles win every time.
I agree it’s a game of whack a mole
But it’s not directly comparable to infosec. In adblocking is a game of whack a mole on both sides. And even if you get around the adblocking today, there’s no guarantee you’ll do it tomorrow.
Indeed, it’s why Nintendo will never win the war against piracy, the Pirates only have to break the code once. I’m sure Nintendo could update it to make it harder to crack, but it will never be impossible to crack. And it’s not like they are going to support the Nintendo switch forever. Eventually everybody is getting there rare shiny event Pokemon and their smash mods to make Waluigi and whoever the meme character of the week is playable