YouTube’s Battle Against Ad Blockers: The Strike on 3rd-Party Media Players

“YouTube” Crackdown on Third-Party Media Players in Battle Against Ad Blockers”

Attempts to convince users to subscribe to YouTube premium

YouTube has effectively eradicated the capability for users to bypass its endless advertisements by utilizing third-party applications. A YouTube employee stated in a community announcement published by Google on Monday that users of third-party media players equipped with ad blockers may encounter buffering difficulties or content errors due to the applications in question.

According to the announcement, “We’re strengthening our enforcement on third-party apps that violate YouTube’s Terms of Service, specifically ad-blocking apps. “We only allow third-party apps to use our API when they follow our API Services Terms of Service, and when we find an app that violates these terms, we will take appropriate action to protect our platform, creators, and viewers.”

Ad-blockers are prohibited “to prevent creators from being rewarded for viewership, to support YouTube creators, and to enable billions of people to use the streaming service,” according to the announcement. Patrons desiring to access YouTube content devoid of the persistent presence of numerous advertisements per video ought to—you predicted it—subscribe to YouTube Premium for $14 per month.

Applications such as VLC, NewPipe, and AdGuard are anticipated to be affected by the change. While specific applications aim to replicate YouTube’s browsing and viewing experience on desktops and mobile devices, others, such as AdGuard, require access to be initiated from within a native YouTube video.

Each of them utilizes the ad blockers on their respective media clients to bypass pre-roll, post-roll, skippable, and non-skippable advertisements. Furthermore, most provide enhanced privacy protection, which is unsurprising for a corporation like Google. 

YouTube has intensified its ad blocker campaign in the last year. In May, the company tested a pop-up that instructed users with ad-blocking software to either permit advertisements or upgrade to Premium.

A few months later, that pop-up was transformed into a widespread rollout requiring users to turn off their ad blockers to continue viewing. Many Mozilla Firefox users also observed that YouTube videos commenced with an odd five-second lag.

YouTube insisted that this was due to the ad-blocking capabilities of the viewer’s browser and not to the fact that they were using Firefox rather than Google Chrome; however, the issue was resolved as soon as the viewer switched to Chrome.