I’m sure you’ve heard that YouTube is no longer allowing content blockers on its platform. Developers of these content blockers and YouTube have been trying to one-up each other for years. This minor arms race is coming to a head now.
Ads on YouTube are worse than ever—in quantity and quality. I recently sat through two unskippable ads before a thirty-second clip. Then a mid-roll ad every five minutes on a long tutorial video. YouTube is either serving ads for Grammarly or ads for fake mobile video games, pyramid schemes, and crypto scams. You can block some of those, by the way.
YouTube is always concocting new kinds of ads. Think pre-roll ads, mid-roll ads, unskippable ads, banner ads, overlay ads, vertical ads, bumper ads, shopping ads, ad breaks during live streams, and hidden sponsorship ads. Now that YouTube is even trying to push ads on pause screens, it’s hard to imagine there was a time when YouTube didn’t have any ads whatsoever. The whole focus was just giving people a platform to “broadcast” themselves.
But all good things must come to an end. And for YouTube, that end came in the shape of Google, which acquired the platform in 2006 and introduced ads.
The early ad formats were pretty benign. YouTube called them “Participatory Video Ads” or PVA, which interested viewers could click to watch exclusive content from brands like music albums and TV show clips. There were also minimalist text-based banner ads, and promos spread across the page, occasionally accompanied by graphics. They mostly stayed out of your way.
Eventually, YouTube turned its attention to the video player itself and started overlaying those banner ads directly onto the videos. Around 2010, pre-roll ads (the video ads that play before a video starts) started popping up before some videos. It wasn’t as frequent, though. Longer but skippable ads also rose around that time.
We don’t see them as often now, but banner ads on YouTube’s homepage also became common back then. With unskippable ads, vertical video ads on mobile, and now pause screen ads, YouTube has shoved ads almost everywhere it can.
The point I’m trying to make is this: ads on YouTube have progressively become insufferable. And they’re only going to get worse (more on that in a bit).
It’s no wonder that people use ad blockers on YouTube. It’s hard to estimate what percentage of YouTube visitors have ad blockers enabled, but only 30% of people worldwide have ad blockers installed on their computers (not counting mobile users). So, it’s safe to say it wasn’t an overwhelming number. But Google decided it’s affecting the bottom line enough to bring the hammer down on Adblock users.
People with ad-block enabled started seeing a wall inside the video player with warnings that ad-blocking isn’t allowed on the platform. It forces them to disable the ad-blocker if they want to watch the video. YouTube also added an artificial 5-second lag for ad-block users across all browsers.
This crackdown on content blockers is a part of YouTube’s strategy to push the premium subscription. The subscription service is mostly built around withholding basic core features (many of which used to be free). Background listening, downloading high-quality videos on mobile, high-quality streams, and even queuing up videos on mobile are now locked behind a paywall.
YouTube creates the problem and sells you the solution. From YouTube’s perspective, pushing more ads and banning ad blockers either means more revenue from ads or more premium subscriptions. It sounds like a win-win. But I think this strategy is going to backfire.
When YouTube first introduced its anti-ad-block wall, ad-block developers updated their software to circumvent the wall. That’s how we got anti-anti-adblock scripts. So it’s clear that ad-blockers are fighting back, and YouTube hasn’t won (yet, anyway).
Secondly, and more importantly, YouTube’s strategy to discourage people from using ad-blockers is going to have the opposite effect. Let me tell you why.
Back in the day, there was a huge public campaign against digital piracy that opened with “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car!” It equated illegally downloading a movie with stealing an actual car, handbag, or TV and shoplifting, which the internet (understandably) turned into a meme.
Curiously enough, it also led to a dramatic rise in online piracy. In the early years of the internet, not everyone knew you could just download music and movies from the internet for free. So, ironically, it made people more likely to pirate. Researchers even did a study on the phenomenon.
That’s the same path YouTube is heading down with its aggressive anti-Adblock campaign. I explored Google Trends for searches related to blocking ads on YouTube, and they’re pretty steady over the years except for some huge spikes around September and October 2023 when YouTube widely rolled out the anti-adblock wall.
I tried multiple keywords and found the same results.
AllAboutCookies noticed a 336% jump in traffic on their YouTube ad-blocker pages. They also conducted a survey and found that 22% of ad block users were more likely to install advanced ad blockers after finding out about YouTube’s anti-adblock wall, and 52% refused to pay YouTube anything.
That’s why YouTube’s plan for kicking ad blockers off the platform is going to backfire. A lot more people are finding out about ad-blocker software, and it’s only making the software more sophisticated. Besides, people who use ad blockers are much less likely to click on an ad in the first place.
So far, it seems like ad-block companies and developers are staying one step ahead of YouTube, but the tech giant might have a kill move up its sleeve.
YouTube recently started experimenting with an entirely new kind of ad format called server-side ad injection. Instead of serving an ad ahead of or in the middle of a video, YouTube has started injecting ads directly into the stream. It makes the ad a part of the YouTube video, rendering ad-blockers totally useless since they can’t tell the video content apart from the ad.
People have already reported seeing ads despite active ad-blockers. Server-side injection might finally manage to hamstring content blockers on YouTube.
That’s not to say that YouTube has definitely won. Developers are working on outsmarting server-side injection. One solution could be detecting ad content using AI and automatically fast-forwarding to the video content.
It’s unclear how far this escalation will go, but it is clear that ads on YouTube are only going to get more annoying to deal with unless you cough up 14 bucks a month.
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My ad blocker still works, and I’ll continue using it for as long as it makes a difference. I am never, ever, going to pay for it. If they do manage to prevent ads from being blocked, I’ll just reduce or stop my consumption.
They would undoubtedly get more sympathy if they weren’t so obnoxious with the ads. I watched a 9-minute video on my phone earlier, which doesn’t have a blocker installed – there was an ad before the video which was skippable, and then about a minute into the video, there were 2 15-second unskippable ads. Another video was about 30 minutes long and had 5 ad breaks in it, some skippable, some not.
The points at which they are injected are also irritating, often appearing in the middle of a sentence, or sometimes even mid-word. I know that creators can select where they want ads to appear, but many don’t, especially in longer videos. It’s strange that with all their fancy algorithms and AI, they can pick out copyrighted music or “offensive” language to demonetise people, but they can’t pick out a more suitable place to insert an advert.
If your phone is android, use ReVanced, if not watch your YouTube in Brave mobile.
> If they do manage to prevent ads from being blocked, I’ll just reduce or stop my consumption.
Everyone says this like it’s some kind of threat, but thats literally the goal.
If youre not making them money, you’re costing them money. If you’re not going to pay, then the next best thing is to stop using the platform so you’re not costing them bandwidth and power.
In the end adblocker users are going to win. There is no way around it. If I have to be slightly inconvenienced to tape the whole video like TiVo and then play it back, so be it. YouTube can inject all they want, AI is going to sort those injected ads no problem.
Smarttube already skips in-video ads, and sponsor spots, and engagement throws, and intro outro videos, so…
Yeah, because it’s based off timestamps from the sponsorblock database API. This method can’t work for real ads since they’re not going to be the same for everyone, different ad and different duration.
Brave still blocks ads, but for some reason I have to always start it as administrator, still better than having to watch 1 video per 100 ads
Lets see when and how it will end. Would love to see some new competition in marked since Youtube without adblock or subscription is just unusable. Also i will never click on any ad, only by mistake. Simply just because it’s fcking ad. I use adblock for youtube but im completely fine with ads at howtogeek. As long as they are not annoying i don’t mind, everyone should get smth for time and effort
Abd adblockers like uBlock origin are getting even more sofiaticared too, and it’s still worked on YouTube for a while now. ReVanced for Android is also a great option. Another thing that’s rising is Brave browser. That browser comes with prebuilt support for AdGuard, uBlock Origin, and even its own custom adblocker (which itself does fairly well against YouTube), and now it’s letting users inject custom JavaScript into websites, which can be used to our advantage against YouTube ads. As YouTube’s adblocker blocking and ad-injection gets better, so will workarounds.
Adblockers always won and will always win. In the worst case they can try getting the stream from a premium user and inject that into the non-premium user’s stream, or get the stream from a country like Albania, and make the player play that video file for everyone. There is no way for YouTube to win. All their previous methods have failed. I never experienced any of them, and still block ads like I used since I’m alive.
You tube can do whatever tf they want, I’ll keep using adblockers, mirrors and revanced.
If ads are upto 30 seconds for every 5 mins, I don’t have an issue. There’s a pyramid here that needs paying.
But, once I started getting multi minute ads, forget it. I either don’t watch the video or I download it and watch it at leisure without any ads. Injection will allow me to skip as I’ve downloaded it.
My biggest beef is not being able to avoid gambling videos. I report them as inappropriate, but now I get more. The joke is I don’t gamble other than a single line on a lottery ticket once a week. But I find it abhorrent as if somebody has a gambling addiction they cannot avoid these ads.
I created my own newsfeed filter to get rid of anything to do with soccer as it’s got to be the most boring sport in the world, 22 millionaires chasing a lump of leather. No thanks 🤪
I use adblock on your website. Currently blocking more than 70 ads. Womp womp LMAO
YouTube is completely unusable without an adblocker, it’s insane the amount of ads that are on there now! They’re literally making it so bad in the hopes that you’ll subscribe to their premium service to get rid of the ads.
I would never support a platform who thinks that annoying their users to try and get subscribers is the way to go. I would support the adblock developers but never greedy corporations!
Sites like this one area almost unusable too. Have you seen what they look like with adblocker turned off?
I recommend sponsorblock, which is a browser plugin which skips segments of videos based on user input. Basically, you can tell the plugin that this section of the video in these timestamps is a sponsor (or one of the multiple other categories) and you can also configure it to skip or not skip any of the categories of sections, like unpaid self promotion or tangents or off topic sections etc. Quite useful.
The problem is not so much the idea of paying, but the price.
Charging people £11.99 a month to remove adverts, when YouTube doesn’t actually make the content, is absolutely crazy. The platform is user-generated content. Those users bear all the costs except hosting and streaming.
People will say the price includes YouTube Music but that’s one of the most legally questionable examples of bundling I’ve ever seen. It means for people who already use another service like Spotify, having to leave their platform of choice. No thanks.
Any more than 99 cents a month is a fucking joke. You don’t start something FOR FREE then create a ridiculously high pay wall to not be subjected to the company’s toxicity of ads. YouTube is just a site in which the talented can broadcast themselves or the untalented, anyone who wants to, nothing about these leeches cultivates or creates talent, and the pr8ice should reflect that.
Cool historical piece. There’s an ad between every paragraph or two on this page. On mobile i have to click away the video ad because it stays in focus while i scroll down. And there’s banner ad between my keyboard and this textbox i had to close.
And the effect of just stop using youtube.
YouTube should be paying us to watch videos simply because, every time a watcher is forced to load an ad that they’re not interested in, that’s essentially YouTube stealing bandwidth that they likely don’t want to give them.
This will break sponsorblock if the inserted ads are at different timestamps for everybody, because people with ad blockers will start seeing ads again and submitting them as sponsorblock segments, then other people will just see their videos skipping random segments.
AI is gonna be the big enemy of youtube (friend and enemy at the same time). Unfortunately, there will be developers claiming a cost for their adblock product. Unfortunately again, a competitor will surpass youtube, offering also the way of migrating all youtube personal content. PATIENCE, folks!
I’ll pay ad blockers 50 a month before I depend a time on those scumbag corpos at YouTube do they can line their already fat pockets. We have to fight corporation giants like this or we will all be slaves before the year 2100
If you use YouTube so much, why not just subscribe? Poof ads go away.
My analogy is this. When ANY company pushs the same ol crapola in ads, It is simply a reminder of who I WILL NOT do business with.
Because then nothing changes and this subscription bullshit gets worse and worse.
to stand up and say enough to something you have to deal with the unfortunate crap that comes with it
