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Definitely an arms race. There's already a solution for if YouTube injects ads directly into the videos -- https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/ i

• shadowgovt 7y ago
  And currently YT et. al. inject the ads by swapping video streams because it's more technically convenient than re-rendering a video on their servers. If video ad blockers take off enough to impact that technological solution, they'll shift to embedding ads directly by modifying the video content itself, because after the up-front cost it becomes win-win for them; the ad blockers will turn a tech like that into a "moat" that YT et. al. can use to keep competing video services at bay. Then the ad blockers will iterate to do their own crowd-source digital fingerprinting of ad content and time-skip around in the video, so the ad companies will iterate to make ads hard to fingerprint or onerous to successfully time skip, etc. Each step in this arms race creates another technological moat to make YT more ad-revenue-viable than possible competitors, who will have to operate on some other revenue stream (and what that revenue stream could be is unclear---subscription model, so only those with disposable income can view videos? Creator-supported model, so only those with disposable income can upload?).