YouTube continues its war on ad blockers, recently showing a notice that confirms videos are slightly slowed down for ad blocker users, while the platform is preparing for longer ad formats.
Earlier this year, YouTube users with an active ad blocker started noticing that videos would load more slowly. The page would be laggy, unresponsive, and overall just not function as intended. YouTube later attributed this to a bug in a popular ad blocker, but something similar has just popped up again.
Recently, YouTube users with an ad blocker installed have noticed that videos seem to buffer more than usual. A pop-up was also spotted which apparently links to a YouTube support page, and directly to a portion of the page that warns against ad blockers.
On that page, YouTube says:
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Check whether your browser extensions that block ads are affecting video playback. As another option, try opening YouTube in an incognito window with all extensions disabled and check if the issue continues.
This combination of events could easily be read as “YouTube is intentionally slowing down videos for users with an ad blocker,” and that’s certainly possible. But, as the situation in January showed, the problem could easily be in the hands of those ad blockers too. In either case, though, YouTube still does not allow for ad blockers, and will continue to make it more difficult to use its platform – which creators get paid from – without either viewing ads or paying for a Premium subscription. Google started a new round of ad blocker blocking earlier this month.
On that note, it seems YouTube also has plans to expand on longer ad formats.
As highlighted by SearchEngineLand, YouTube is beta testing an expansion of 30-second, unskippable ad formats to “regular” advertising campaigns. This would allow more advertisers to use the format which is currently limited to 15-second unskippable ads. The advertiser who spotted the beta test, though, thinks that 30-second ads might be “the tipping point” as far as being too intrusive for the viewer.
YouTube is also testing a combination of 15-second unskippable ads alongside bumper ads.
30-second ads that can’t be skipped on YouTube are nothing new. Google has allowed for this since 2023 on YouTube’s TV experience. However, with this change, they might become a lot more common.
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