YouTube is testing another way to combat ad blockers (techcrunch.com)

Soon llms will simply control the viewer, then Gemini will have to recommend rock/glue sandwiches to compete.

Okay, is using a VPN to appear to be from a country where ads are not shown as much the next step?

I don't yet see how this would end the adblocker arms-race.

If they don't send any additional data identifying where the ad starts, the video-player can't prevent the user from simply forwarding to skip the ad.

If they do include metadata about where the ad is, adblockers can use that to cut it out.

> improving its performance and reliability in serving both organic and ad video content

by doing more processing? And I just thought I couldn't take what Google says any less seriously. I was wrong.