YouTube seems to be slowing the site for anyone with an ad blocker
YouTube hates ad blockers, and the site has been trying to discourage visitors from using them for quite some time. After introducing warnings last year, the site now appears to be reducing performance for anyone who tries to make use of an ad blocker.
While there has been no official announcement about it, the slowdown has not gone unnoticed by YouTube users. Posts on Reddit reveal the laggy site experience for people using an ad blocker -- lag which disappears as soon as ads are re-enabled.
See also:
- Microsoft launches Copilot Pro subscription for people willing to pay to supercharge their AI experience
- PowerToys 2024: Microsoft adds new power user module to its utility collection
- Windows 10 users with KB5034441 update failure need to manually resize partitions to fix the problem
While YouTube-owner Google has yet to go as far as denying access to ad blocker users, it certainly seems as though the company is looking to make the experience of visiting the site while blocking ads as unpleasant as possible. It is something that is easily tested. Visit YouTube with an ad blocker and you will find that videos load much more slowly than when it is disabled.
On top of this, some videos may fail to load at all, and some site features -- such as theater mode -- become very problematic.
A thread on Reddit with posts from disgruntled YouTube users was spotted by 9to5Google. In it, people complain of reduced site performance, slow buffering and other issues. All of the problems vanished the moment ad blocking was disabled.
While Google is clearly trying to encourage people to endure ads, the company would also be happy for increased numbers of users to pay for a YouTube Premium subscription.
Image credit: bilalulker / depositphotos