Since I like my playlists and other subscriber-only YouTube features, I've disabled ABP on on the site for now, but I am wondering if it wouldn't be possible to perform a kind of "soft" blocking, not aimed at preventing the ads from being loaded altogether, but just reducing their nuisance value.
What I'm thinking of is a blocking mode that detects when an ad has started playing -- which I think should be possible by watching for the little widget in the bottom right corner of the video area, the one that says "video will resume in X seconds" or "skip ad" -- and automatically mute the audio when it appears; and when the widget disappears, un-mute the audio. For extra points, it should also detect when the widget changes to "skip ad" and then click it immediately.
This way, the nuisance of ads is greatly reduced, and the video creators still get their ad revenue. Win-win.
I'm toying with the idea of developing a Firefox extension just for this functionality, but I've never done that before so I don't really know how much work that will be, or whether it is even possible. I am interested in finding out, but of course if ABP were to implement this kind of behavior for YouTube, that would be even better.
