YouTube rolls out new protection against ad blockers: Ads are injected server-side

This change may make it much more difficult to block ads

The war between the YouTube video hosting team and ad blockers has reached a new level. According to SponsorBlock, the developer of one of the blockers, YouTube is currently experimenting with introducing server-side advertising. 

Simply put, ads are now proactively made part of the video that is streamed to the device, rather than being delivered separately to the web client or mobile app. This approach makes it difficult for ad blockers, since the advertising content becomes almost indistinguishable from the main video.

Currently, this feature is still in testing and some users have already encountered this issue. However, it has not yet become widespread.