YouTube has been steadily trying out ways to stop ad blockers from working on its site. From big pop-ups shaming your ad blocker use to actually blocking videos, the Google-owned website has been pushing out new measures to try to curb the use of third-party apps such as AdBlock Plus. Now, it seems YouTube has taken another drastic step in this war, by skipping to the end of videos for some users with ad blockers installed.
On Monday, Reddit user u/SDHD4K posted a video of YouTube’s latest attempt to thwart ad blockers, demonstrating how the video they chose to watch simply skips to the end with Adblock Plus enabled. Other comments in the thread confirmed the issue was happening on their end, too, while others claimed YouTube was muting videos when their ad blocker was enabled. Some comments in the Reddit thread dismissed the problem, saying that the AdBlock Plus team will likely have the issue fixed in a matter of hours.
The recent increase of ads on YouTube, as well as the increase in the cost of Google’s own YouTube Premium subscription, have likely pushed more users towards installing an ad blocker. Ads can be annoying, but they can also enable bad actors to share malware with unsuspecting users. That’s why even the FBI recommends people install ad blockers when browsing the web.
If this latest YouTube change sounds annoying, that’s kind of the point. The company wants to make the experience of using ad blockers so annoying that you’ll disable them, and choose to either deal with the ads or pay for Premium. Fortunately for those who don’t want to sit through long, un-skippable ads to watch a short video, there are some alternatives out there.
Based on the user complaints here, most of these issues seem to be directed at programs like AdBlock or AdBlock Plus (no relation). Users running alternatives such as uBlock Origin have reported no issues at all. Some users have been swapping from AdBlock or even installing browsers like Brave—which has a built-in ad blocker—to help avoid these issues. It isn’t a foolproof plan by any means, but if you’re running into this problem, then you might want to try swapping things up and seeing where it gets you. It is possible this issue could also be an unintended behavior on YouTube’s part, but without any official word from the site, that one is hard to prove.
