Today I filed a formal complaint against #YouTube with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner for their illegal deployment of #adblock detection technologies.
Under Article 5(3) of 2002/58/EC YouTube are legally obligated to obtain consent before storing or accessing information already stored on an end user's terminal equipment unless it is strictly necessary for the provisions of the requested service.
In 2016 the EU Commission confirmed in writing that adblock detection requires consent.
I guess that’s fair. There’s a critical point where that happens though. Even if they doubled the amount of ads right now, I bet they wouldn’t lose too many people because there aren’t any real competitor platforms. The amount of youtube ads right now is still significantly less than the equivalent watch time of cable channels, for example. You can watch 20 mins of content and sit through maybe 3 5 second skippable ads, and 3 20 second ads or something? Still significantly less than tv where you have 15 mins of ads every hour.
I guess that’s fair. There’s a critical point where that happens though. Even if they doubled the amount of ads right now, I bet they wouldn’t lose too many people because there aren’t any real competitor platforms. The amount of youtube ads right now is still significantly less than the equivalent watch time of cable channels, for example. You can watch 20 mins of content and sit through maybe 3 5 second skippable ads, and 3 20 second ads or something? Still significantly less than tv where you have 15 mins of ads every hour.