YouTube is currently engaged in a war with ad blockers, which you may have noticed over the past month, considering the website has been stuttering, slow, and flat out not working at the very moment it detects such a program. Well, the latest development in the YouTube ad blocker crackdown is that Google’s taking the fight to third-party apps with ad blockers built-in.
This latest development encompasses things beyond Chrome extensions, such as Adblock Plus and uBlock, and goes into the realm of apps like Opera GX, which has an inbuilt adblocker across web and its mobile apps. The new focus from Google also encompasses third-party YouTube players on mobile that include ad blockers, such as YouTube ++, which has an inbuilt blocker.
“Viewers who are using these third-party apps may experience buffering issues or see the error: “The following content is not available on this app” when trying to watch a video,” YouTube wrote. “We want to emphasise that our terms don’t allow third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership, and Ads on YouTube help support creators and let billions of people around the world use the streaming service.”
Naturally, YouTube then plugged YouTube Premium, which disables ads on the site as part of a subscription.
“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,” YouTube added.
If you’re using a third-party YouTube app, and you notice videos starting to load and buffer a bit slower, then this is likely why.
With all of this happening though, people have started to shift to blockers specifically designed to thwart YouTube’s adblocking – so obviously we can expect YouTube to keep trying to crack down on people dodging site ads.
Image: Gizmodo Australia