I don’t think Youtube cares so much about losing adblock customers. They suck up a lot of video, which costs a boat load of money, for no revenue. Watch time alone is great for attracting investors, but Google doesn’t need investors. Youtube needs more money.
The truth is, Youtube isn’t very profitable compared to any other kind of content Google hosts. You can easily cost Youtube a dollar a day, if not more, by sicking down background playback. That’s not too bad, but you won’t be only one doing it. Look around and see how few Peertube instances there are compared to Mastodon and Lemmy: video hosting sucks much more, and Peertube cheats by using peer to peer redistribution to help with the bandwidth (which means everyone who’s watching the video along with you knows your IP is watching the same thing as them).
Google is in hot water with their real customers (advertisers) for making them pay for showing ads that actually never got shown. They need to fix their metrics to detect ad fraud (hard) or block any attempt to hide ads (easier).
Youtube has know who does and doesn’t use adblock for years. When creators get paid, they show how much revenue they didn’t pay out because of adblockers. I’m honestly surprised they didn’t do this earlier.
I think this is a well-thought out tactic. They’ll lose a bunch of users who never made them any money on the first place, but the ones that are addicted enough will come back and start making money again.
Honestly, I’m annoyed that I’ll be seeing ads soon, but I think it’s for the best. There’s no such thing as free Youtube hosting. People need to start paying for online shit or we’ll end up with megacorporations having more and more control over the internet, which isn’t something we want.
I know paying for stuff sucks, but if we don’t get rid of this “everything must always be free and without ads” mentality, the internet is only going to get worse.