Ad Blockers and a Googley Consequence

April 11, 2025

Another dinobaby blog post. Eight decades and still thrilled when I point out foibles.

Motivated individuals are acting in a manner usually associated with Cloudflare-type of outfits. The idea of a “man in the middle” is a good one. It works when one buys something from Amazon. The user wants convenience and does not take the time to hunt around for a better or cheaper version of a particular product.

“Block YouTube Ads on AppleTV by Decrypting and Stripping Ads from Profobuf” provides a recipe for dumping advertisements in some streaming services, but the spotlight is on the lovable Google and Apple’s streaming device. (Poor Apple. Like its misfiring AI and definitely interesting glasses, the company caught a bright person’s attention.)

Social media needs two things: Beacons that phone home and advertising because how else is a company going to push products and services. The write up provides step-by-step instructions for chopping out ads from two big outfits.

Here’s what I think will happen at the monopolies:

At least two software people will tackle this “problem”: One from Apple and one from Google.
One will come up with a “fix” to the work-around
The “fix” will be shared with the company who did not come up with an enhancement first
The modified method will be deployed
The game begins again.

The cat-and-mouse sequence is little more than that von Neumann game theory just in real life with money at stake. It’s too bad Johnny and his pals (some of whom were quite quirky) are not around to work on ad blocking instead of nuclear weapons.

Well, Johnny isn’t around, and I think that game theory does not work when one battles multi billion dollar monopolies with lots of reasonably bright people around providing they aren’t veterans of the Apple AI team or the original Google Glass product.

The write up is interesting. I admire the effort the author put into the blocking. How long will it persist? Good question, but the next iteration will probably be designed to preserve the money flow. Ads and user tracking are the means to the end: Big revenue.

Stephen E Arnold, April 11, 2025

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Advertising, Business strategy, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.