YouTube and adblockers have had a back-and-forth battle for years now, but this may now be coming to an end as the video platform crackdown on these browser extensions.
It’s widely reported that people using any form of ad blocker are seeing YouTube videos being skipped right to the end. The video doesn’t even play, but instead jumps to the closing titles immediately.
A Reddit user took to the YouTube board to share the ‘adblock weird behavior,’ and many replied with similar experiences.
New Youtube adblock weird behaviour – video automatically skips to the end
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One user said: “Yeah, confirmed, mine is muting the audio (opera adblock). Disabled adblock then it works fine…”
Another said they have “no sound whenever I use ad blocker on YT. You can adjust the volume slider for a second then it goes mute again.”
Ad-blocks are extensions that have become very popular over the last few years as they remove any intrusive advertisements across multiple platforms.
The American online video sharing platform uses adverts to generate income for the company and its content creators.
Team YouTube gave a warning to ad block users last month
While YouTube hasn’t come out with any information around this new skipping phenomenon for those attempting to watch with ad block, they did say they were tightening enforcement in April.
An ‘Enforcement on Third Party Apps’ article was posted on the website’s community page which directly mentioned ‘strengthening’ enforcement on third-party apps that violate the platform’s Terms of Service.
The post read: “Viewers who are using these third-party apps may experience buffering issues or see the error ‘The following content is not available on this app’ when trying to watch a video.
“We want to emphasize that our terms don’t allow third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership, and Ads on YouTube help support creators and let billions of people around the world use the streaming service.”
Instead of using other software, the Google-owned company said that the only way to have an entirely ad-free experience is by purchasing a YouTube Premium membership.
This allows users to watch without any intrusions and videos can be downloaded to be watched offline too, but there’s a cost of $13.99 a month for the privilege.
Photo by Leon Bublitz on Unsplash
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