Over the past year, YouTube, the world's most successful video site, has been trying to make ads available to every user, and its fight against ad blockers is a vivid illustration of what it means to be "you have a good plan, I have a ladder".
Now, YouTube is eyeing the "last piece of pure land" for users - third-party clients. A few days ago, YouTube announced that it will intensify its efforts to crack down on third-party applications (especially ad-blocking apps) that violate the API Terms of Service, and prohibit all third-party clients from blocking ads, and if they detect blocking ads, they will ban the playback of video content.
"We want to emphasize that our terms don't allow third-party apps to turn off ads, as that would prevent creators from being rewarded for viewership, and that ads on YouTube help support creators and make streaming services available to billions of people around the world," YouTube claimed.
It is reported that at present, when users use a third-party client with ad blocking function to watch videos in YouTube, the system will automatically prompt "This application does not provide the following content" or "Buffering failed".
While cracking down on ad blocking, YouTube also didn't forget to advertise the alternatives they have in store for users, "We understand that some users prefer a completely ad-free experience, which is why YouTube Premium is being offered. We only allow third-party applications that comply with the API Terms of Service to use our APIs, and we will take appropriate steps to protect our platform, creators, and viewers if we find an application that violates these terms."
In other words, if you want to watch content on YouTube for free, you have to watch ads, and if you don't want to watch ads, you need to subscribe to YouTube Premium. In fact, forcing users to choose one or the other has been YouTube's main job at the operational level over the past year.
YouTube has always appeared in the public opinion arena of the Internet as a user-friendly product. Especially in the domestic market, YouTube is often compared with Aiyouteng as a positive example, when everyone complains about the latter's lengthy ads of more than 100 seconds, YouTube can be skipped ads and become "other people's children".
In the past, YouTube used TrueView, a skipped ad, because of Google's technical superiority in ad performance attribution.
John Warnamaker, the father of department stores, once famously said, "I know that half of my investment in advertising is useless, but the problem is that I don't know which half." The background of this sentence is the pre-Internet era dominated by print media and outdoor advertising, when the monitoring and evaluation mechanism of advertising effect was not mature enough, so it was naturally impossible to accurately evaluate the effect of advertising. All advertisers knew that advertising budgets would be wasted, and the advantage of TrueView ads was that they could help advertisers identify who were the potential audience.
In fact, advertisers are not disgusted by the fact that YouTube ads can be skipped, but they are happy to see it because it actively helps advertisers filter out users who are not interested in ads. On the other hand, it is not difficult to find that it is precisely because users are given the right to skip ads after 5 seconds, during this time, users will inevitably stare firmly at the screen and wait for the "skip ad" button to appear. What's more, if the ad is finished at the end, it means that the corresponding user is likely to be a potential audience. So the counterintuitive phenomenon of offering skip ads is to sell ads better, which is the unique charm of YouTube.
Unfortunately, times have changed, and YouTube doesn't seem to be recovering with the U.S. digital advertising market, and Google's top brass has bluntly stated that YouTube's "direct response" ads and brand ads have slowed down.
YouTube's poor performance for several quarters is a big reason why Susan Wojcicki, a veteran who has been CEO since 2014, left Google. As a result of the drastic changes in the digital advertising market, YouTube must look for a change, and cracking down on ad blockers and getting ads to reach more users is clearly the most effective way to do so.
The reality is that in the second quarter of 2023, when YouTube officially began to refresh its ad blocker, YouTube's ad revenue came to $7.67 billion, exceeding the average analyst estimate of $7.43 billion. Seeing that this trick is so effective, it is not difficult to understand that YouTube has expanded the coverage of this move from the web and official apps to third-party apps. However, this move also means that after Facebook, X, and Reddit, another Internet giant has lost its enthusiasm for "open platforms".
"Open platform" is actually a word that was very popular at the end of the PC Internet more than ten years ago, and Meta, which was still called Facebook at that time, has grown into a giant in just a few years by relying on the open platform strategy. At that time, the game was very simple, that is, to open up the massive social user profiles and relationship data owned by Facebook to third-party developers through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), and with just a few lines of code, thousands of websites were turned into an extension of the platform's behavioral nodes, so that their isolated websites merged into a social network.
The core of the development platform strategy is to realize service aggregation through platform openness, ultimately enhance the value of the platform, extend based on the Internet vendors' own business, and abstract their capabilities from the business to quickly realize service delivery and empower third-party developers. But more than ten years ago, the Internet industry can be said to be full of blue oceans that no one has set foot in, and Google and Meta at that time were not the giants with hundreds of thousands of employees around the world today, and the limited number of employees at that time was obviously not enough to support them in everything.
The development platform is actually a means of giving profits to third-party developers in exchange for using the power of third-party and occupying the minds of users as quickly as possible. However, as these giants have grown in size, they have found that recruiting third-party developers requires sharing benefits with them, and using their own employees directly is "rotting in the pot". Therefore, when their power continues to grow, the Internet no longer exists in the wilderness, and the giants begin to fight each other in close combat, the open platform strategy is a little awkward.
When the Internet giants found that the benefits brought by borderless expansion could be more intuitively reflected in their financial reports, they began to think about the question, that is, why didn't they do this business themselves?