Inside the ‘arms race’ between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.::YouTube’s dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there’s an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.
This is completely wrong. You are serving video stream, you just substitute for the ad you would serve the user, at a randomized point in the video. YouTube doesn’t do this because they don’t want to reimplement the tracking and logging, but if it was financially necessary it wouldn’t be hard to do.
They would then also need to implement a new (and much less intuitive than 4m20s) way of referring to specific timestamps, since with ads at random points the timecode would be dynamically changing for each viewing.