Over the past few weeks, the Silicon Valley giant seems to have tightened the screws over its video streaming service. Initially, it made some under-the-hood changes that end up breaking YouTube Vanced. For the unaware, this app uses the official YouTube API but provides all the paid features for free, so its end was just around the corner, but still, it managed to stay afloat for quite a few years.
Likewise, the YouTube Return Disklike extension, as is evident by its name, helped in getting back one of the most useful features of YouTube. This is because most of us usually rely on the dislikes to like ratio a video has received in order to ascertain whether the content is genuine or clickbait.
While there are still a few users out there who don’t use both the aforementioned services, but ad blocking is something that near about every user tends to use, especially while streaming YouTube. But it could spell the end of the road for these blockers, as far as the video streaming site is concerned, again all thanks to Google!
YouTube might block Ad Blockers from its website!
A user on Reddit posted a screenshot, wherein he was greeted with a banner that stated that “Ad Blockers are not allowed on YouTube”. As of now, only a handful of users have got this message but this is just because Google initially tests these channels with a randomly selected few users before ultimately rolling out to the wider audiences. And this change has now been officially confirmed as well!
According to the moderator of the YouTube forum on Reddit: “Yes, this has been confirmed as an experiment by YouTube, confirmed by a YouTube employee that reached out to me.” So it’s only a matter of time before YouTube ends blocking any and every type of ad blocker on its website.
Being a publisher myself, ads are a major source of income for us, but at the same time, being shown 30 seconds of unskippable ads doesn’t equate to a great usage experience either. The best Google could have done is to find a middle ground as to the total number of ads being shown, their duration, and their location as well. But if that had been the case, then no one would purchase their Premium plan in the first place!
Many users don’t have any issues in viewing ads as it only helps their favorite publishers monetarily, however, the way these ads are delivered tends to disrupt the entire viewing experience. And this is something which they are totally against. As a result, they are left with no choice but to opt for an ad-blocker.
Moroever, many users have voiced their concern that if this change gets implemented then they will leave Youtube for good. While that might be a hard pill to swallow, but the truth is there’s no other worthy competitor to YouTube, so sooner than later, users will be back to this site, and Google knows that too! So all in all: Google 1 User 0.
Still, let’s not lose hope as the developer community is usually quick to find a loophole and bring in their tweak that ends up bypassing the Google restrictions, as it has happened countless times in the past [such as bringing back the old UI, increasing the number of rows of videos, and the return of Youtube dislike counter]. As and when that happens, we will update this guide accordingly. In the meantime, please share your valuable opinions with us in the comments section.
