Item: Developer Devised A Workaround On YouTube Ads By Speeding Them Up
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Author: Low Boon Shen

Developer Devised A Workaround On YouTube Ads By Speeding Them Up

In the latest round of the YouTube ad blocking saga, a developer has made an extension on Chrome that doesn’t block ads specifically. Instead, the ads are sped up significantly to minimize the time lost in watching the ads. The user, hackhive-io, has demonstrated the extension in action with ads scrubbed through within mere seconds.

Google has deemed ad blockers non-compliant on its video-sharing platform, and has since increased its efforts in cracking down on users with ad blockers. However, this extension, called Ad Speedup, technically doesn’t block ads – it just speeds them up for you as much as 16x, making even a 30-second ad shrunk down to just less than 2 real-life seconds (1.875 seconds to be exact, if you’re counting). At the same time, it will mute the ads by default.

On top of speeding ads up, there’s also a good chance that you may encounter ads that are a few minutes long, with the skip button present. In that case, the developer says the future update will skip the ad as soon as it is available. There are also plans to apply this workaround on other platforms, such as Twitch.

As for the effects it may create on advertisers on the platform, that remains to be seen. Ads are typically measured in a metric called “impressions”, which indicates how many people have seen the ads – this is how the ad payment is measured in conventional wisdom. In any case, this is unlikely to violate YouTube’s current Terms of Service (as it doesn’t block ads specifically), though the company may change its wording depending on the advertiser’s reactions.

Source: 9to5Google