Video streaming platform YouTube has been making the news every so often since 2023 for the very same reason – ever increasing measures in ad blocker crackdowns. What started as an experiment, or so the Alphabet subsidiary claims, has gone from strength to strength. But rather than outright blocking ad blockers, the latest strategy looks to be frustrating users into turning them off of their own accord.
This comes in the form of slowing down the speed in which videos load. As spotted by PCWorld, users on Reddit and the Brave browser forum have seen videos loading abnormally slowly, looking as if it doesn’t even start buffering until after the duration of the average ad has passed. Making things worse is the popup that appears during this blackout period, which essentially asks you to try again after turning off your ad blockers.
More specifically, one entry in the technical support page asks you to “check your extensions, including ad blockers”. The section says if just turning off ad blockers is not working “try opening YouTube in an incognito window with all extensions disabled and check if the issue continues”.
For better or worse, we’ve seen this happen before early last year, even if it’s unclear if the blame truly lies with YouTube at the time. This time though some of the users of the aforementioned platforms speculate that this wave of slowdowns may be targeting specific Google or YouTube accounts with a history of blocking ads. Doing it this way is speculated to bypass the usual sort of interaction with browsers or extensions.
Of course, the simplest way to not have to deal with any of this is to pony up for YouTube Premium, which itself has seen price increases for the subscription. Though things would be pretty awkward if subscribers suddenly started reporting similar issues.
(Source: Reddit, Brave forums via PCWorld)
