YouTube is now cracking down on ad blockers by employing various tactics to slow them down or block them.
Back in 2022, YouTube successfully managed to shut down the popular third-party YouTube vanced app to encourage users to pay and join YouTube Premium if they’re looking for an ad-free experience.
The following year, YouTube started its war against ad blockers and started testing blocking ad blockers. Later that year, users were unable to play videos on the platform if it detected an ad blocker employed by the user.
At the beginning of this year, YouTube started slowing down the video load time for users who had ad blockers on their browsers. And now YouTube is testing a new strategy to crack down on ad blockers by completely skipping the video.
This week many users noticed that YouTube videos are skipping straight to the end of the video. Even if you’ve replayed the video, it will just skip to the end again. It is strange, but it only happened with users who’ve installed an ad blocker extension on their browsers. A few users disabled the ad blocker and the playback was returned to normal.
Some users reported that if you try to skip to a certain part of the video, it just endlessly loads.
Now, the users think that this is intentional by YouTube to discourage users from installing ad blockers. However, there is another way of looking at it. It is possible that there is a problem with the ad blocker itself.
It looks like YouTube is committed to its ad-supported revenue model and wants to ensure that if you don’t want to see ads, sign up for YouTube Premium membership. The users are rushing in to find workarounds. Some users have already found them.
Some Reddit users found that using a VPN and setting the location to Albania will allow you to browse YouTube without any ads. This is due to the fact that Google does not support the Albanian language yet.
