YouTube has been waging war against the use of ad blockers for quite some time now and its latest trick is the craftiest one yet.
Some YouTube users determined to avoid the commercial interruptions – which are bloody annoying but provide revenue to both the service provider and people creating the videos for everyone to watch – have noticed videos are now skipping all the way to the end when playback is attempted.
According to some people on Reddit (via 9to5Google), only disabling their ad-blocker causes video performance to resume as intended. Some people said that if they have been able to work around the skip, then the audio drops out completely.
It might be some sort of problem with the ad blocker itself. It might also be the ad blocker causing inadvertent problems as it interacts with YouTube. However, judging by recent form, it seems most likely this is another ploy from YouTube to discourage use of the revenue-sapping tech.
YouTube, of course, gives users the option to remove the ads by paying for YouTube Premium, which is expensive but includes access to the YouTube Music service. However, that would involve ad-swervers having to pay for music too.
Naturally, Reddit is awash with folks who are aggrieved at the sheer audacity of Google interfering with their inalienable rights to free content on the internet and anything that might pay for that free content.
“I hate YouTube so much. Greedy Company,” writes _k1llswitch. “The Ads are ridiculous sometimes and I will NEVER pay a penny for your stupid premium service. I don’t use YouTube on my Phone so that ain’t no problem and I guess I just have to wait until the AdBlock people found a way to get it working again.”
The apparent skipping issue comes after Google began warning that people with ad-blockers enabled would not be able to watch videos. Then playback slowed and, in some cases, unduly taxed the computer’s memory and caused slow performance of the machine itself.
One thinks this is a battle YouTube is probably going to continue fighting, as ad blockers and users continue to insist on finding new workarounds.
