YouTube’s war on ad blockers is starting to affect more users

It is no secret that many users use ad blockers with their browsers. This isn’t so much that people don’t want to support creators, but rather the way many ads are formatted, they can be intrusive and ruin the overall experience.

If you do use ad blockers for websites such as YouTube, it looks like that may no longer be possible. According to a post on Reddit, it appears that YouTube’s anti-ad blocker campaign is rolling out to more users, essentially preventing them from watching videos until they disable it.

YouTube quietly started their campaign earlier this year where some users reported that they see messages telling them that ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube. The platform later became slightly more aggressive by giving users “three strikes”. This means that users have three chances of disabling their ad blockers or adding YouTube to its “allowlist” otherwise YouTube will stop working until they do so.

At this point in time there doesn’t appear to be a workaround for this, but in a way it’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are many creators who rely solely on platforms like YouTube as a source of income, so spending a few seconds watching ads shouldn’t really be that big of an ask.

Source: Android Police