YouTube’s Crackdown on Ad Blockers Makes Videos Unwatchable

YouTube has been at war against ad blockers for some time now and has used various tactics to drive users away from these extensions. Its most recent defense strategy consists of skip straight to the end of the video you are playing. If you try to play it again, it will start again. If you tap anywhere on the timeline, your video will buffer indefinitely. Here is what it looks like in action.

This is not its first attempt to combat ad blockers on the platform. I was a faithful AdBlock user, but I was forced to disable the extension for YouTube to work on my laptop. As far as I remember, one of its first actions was to send a pop-up warning saying: “Video playback is blocked unless YouTube is on the allow list or the ad blocker is disabled.” » However, users can close this pop-up and resume watching their videos.

Then it tried to make videos unplayable by displaying an endless loading screen. Then he even refused to do it and wanted show immovable prompt to turn off the ad blocker.

This latest decision is frustrating, and that’s the point. There was a time when his ads were tolerable, but with the recent increase in ads on the video platform, users find it extremely difficult to watch a 20-second non-skippable ad followed by a 5-second skippable ad. The ad runtime is not proportional to the length of a video, which adds to the weirdness.

Google is aware of its monopoly on the video sharing industry and has increased its Premium level prices without advertising at $14 per month. It has also expanded its crackdown on mobile, leading to buffering issues and error messages for users who dare to use an ad blocker on their phone.

So far, one of the most popular ad blockers, AdBlock, has handled YouTube’s metrics pretty well by tweaking its code and tackling every new strategy YouTube uses. This is how he managed to survive several repressions. But YouTube also manages to quickly counter these new changes in this years-long cat-and-mouse game between YouTube and AdBlock.

Users also understood workarounds. Some turn to AdBlock alternatives, such as uBlock Origin, while others recommend browser substitutes like Brave to solve the problem. Some disappointed consumers are also considering saying goodbye to the platform. However, in the absence of major video sharing platforms to replace them, I doubt their boycott will be sustainable.