YouTube appeared to be continuing its war on ad blockers

2024/01/16 23:58

YouTube’s ad blocker problems are just an Adblock Plus bug.

YouTube appeared to be continuing its war on ad blockers, with users complaining that the company was slowing down the site for users it catches running an ad blocker. 9to5Google spotted this Reddit thread filled with users seeing poor loading performance with ad blockers enabled.

A video at the top of the Reddit post shows what some users are seeing: A video with an ad blocker on can't load quickly enough to keep up with the playback speed (which isn't on normal; it's maybe 2x) and has to pause at around 30 seconds. Turning off the ad blocker immediately improves loading performance, with the white line on YouTube's progress bar showing significantly more buffering runway. Users report that the ad-block detection causes strange issues, like "lag" that makes full screen or comments not work or Chrome being unable to load other webpages while YouTube is open.

Learn more: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/youtube-appears-to-be-reducing-video-and-site-performance-for-ad-block-users...

Last modified by 2024/01/16 23:58