YouTube Will Skip And Mute Videos To Prevent You From Enjoying Them With An Ad Blocker Enabled
YouTube’s war on ad blockers isn’t a new thing. Unsurprisingly, the company has always been opposed to the concept of ad blockers because it provides a way for users to circumvent what is one of the company’s major income streams. Before, they’d use all sorts of techniques ranging from kindly recommending you turn off your ad blocker to intentionally slowing down YouTube when the unwanted software is detected.
Well now, it seems that Google has decided to outright prevent you from enjoying videos on YouTube if you choose not to let them show you ad after ad. These findings are from Reddit user SDHD4K, and he says that the first means Google will take is to skip a video entirely when an ad blocker is detected. You can try and play any video, but it will skip you straight to the end. Talk about aggressive.
However, if you somehow have the luck not to be hit with the video skip trick, the next move up YouTube’s sleeve is to mute the video (and what’s a YouTube video without the audio?). Sure, it seems that tweaking the volume slider will bring back audio, but only for a second before it decides to mute once again.
Adblock Plus seems to be the main target of YouTube’s new war though it is not alone. Unsurprisingly, some ad blockers are introducing workarounds to make sure that this war continues to rage on.
At This Point, YouTube Premium Might Be A Worthy Trade-Off For The Hassle
Here’s the thing, and I’m not trying to be a shill here, but I’ve been subscribed to a YouTube Premium family plan for several years now (with a bunch of “family” that I added to it) and I don’t regret it one bit. I’ve been sheltered from how bad ads have gotten on YouTube these days, so I see why people resort to ad blockers, but I think that’s more than enough reason to go for YouTube Premium.
If you stream music, it’s even easier to make that case since you get YouTube Music thrown into the mix as well. Then, there’s Picture-in-Picture mode (though free users are starting to get that), background play, video downloads, a higher bitrate video quality option, and more.
I get it is cheaper to keep dodging YouTube with effective ad blockers, but at a point, it might just be a lot easier on the mind to just go for Premium.
