YouTube is a free platform with ads, but it offers a premium service to give users an ad-free experience, along with other features such as offline downloads of videos. To help fund not only the site but also its creators, ads are used to help the platform earn a profit from non-paying users. But it seems times are changing.
For a while now, Google has been trying to find ways to ensure that ads are played on the platform. It was reported by Business Insider that both Google and AdBlock have a “complicated relationship.” When YouTube Premium was first released, it promoted itself as the best way for an ad-free viewing experience. However, tech-savvy people already knew ways to bypass ads without paying.
So has Google found a way to win its war against adblockers on YouTube?
Are ad blockers banned on YouTube?
Ads on YouTube have begun to get more annoying, depending on who you ask. As of writing, at least two ads are played before each video, and this could increase if the creator placed more ad spots in-between videos. At the same time, there are ads on the platform that could easily be seen as scams by a tech-savvy user. Users making use of ad blockers isn’t a huge secret, hence why creators opt for the in-video ad reads and sponsorships to help increase profits from their content.
While these methods help the creator, it doesn’t entirely help YouTube as a platform. Google needed to do something so that the biggest video platform could earn profits from tech-savvy users.
Reddit user u/Sazk100 shared on r/YouTube a screenshot of a popup that prevented the user from accessing the site due to ad blockers being active. The pop-up gave the user two options, turn their ad blockers off or pay for YouTube Premium. Moderators of r/YouTube confirmed that this is an experimental feature that YouTube is trying to implement.
At the moment, this feature isn’t official and is currently being trialed and experimented with by a handful of users that catch it. But if even YouTube does succeed in preventing ad blockers on the platform, Redditors have pointed out other ways to block pesky and annoying ads through other means, like inbuilt blockers on browsers. Only time will tell if this will become a permanent feature.