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YouTube is taking its campaign against ad blockers to a whole new level. The platform prevents users from watching videos unless they turn off the ad blockers or buy a Premium subscription.
Showing ads to users is a primary source of revenue for YouTube. The Google-owned video-sharing platform generated over $29 billion from ads in 2022. The revenue is expected to grow 4%, reaching over $30 billion, in 2023. But the biggest obstacle against YouTube ad revenue has always been ad blockers.
YouTube to disable videos for users with ad blockers
While YouTube’s crackdown on ad blockers isn’t a new move, the platform has “launched a global effort” to disable ad blockers, according to YouTube communications manager Christopher Lawton. Lawton also added they started a “small experiment globally” in June to disable ad blockers.
Users with enabled ad blockers now receive a notice saying, “Video playback is blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled.” They can either allow ads or buy a YouTube Premium subscription, which costs $14 monthly. Lawton noted using ad blockers violates YouTube’s terms of service.
“Ads support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube,” Lawton stated. Watching YouTube videos with ad blockers enabled could also negatively affect the revenue of content creators.
Users in online forums like Reddit are raising their voices against YouTube’s crackdown on ad blockers and threatening to boycott the platform or move to an alternative service. A Reddit user wrote, “If they don’t drop this adblock (which they probably won’t), I’m just not going to use the site, I’ll just hop over to Soundcloud or Spotify and listen to music and watch YouTube on my phone.”
Some ad blocking services started to teach tricks to users to bypass the YouTube ban. For example, Adblock Plus recommends users keep their filter lists updated or use custom blocking rules. The uBlock Origin also still works on Firefox browser.
Since YouTube is highly dependent on ad revenues, it will never let ad blockers disrupt the flow, and it continues to disable videos for users with enabled ad blockers. The only way you have is to watch YouTube videos with ads (which is very annoying) or buy a Premium subscription.