YouTube Is Further Punishing Users With Ad Blockers By Intentionally Slowing Down Webpages
UPDATE: Both YouTube and the extensions involved, Adblock and Adblock Plus, have clarified that it is a bug on the extensions’ end that caused the performance issues – they were unintentional. The original article follows.
YouTube Is Further Punishing Users With Ad Blockers By Intentionally Slowing Down Webpages
YouTube is doubling down on its anti-adblock stance and is pushing even more aggressive measures for those who have ad blockers active. Recently, the video-sharing platform has begun to intentionally slow down the webpage, and one must either disable the ad blocker or pay for YouTube Premium to fix it.
The whole effort of targeting ad blockers has more or less begun since last summer, when the platform will first warn the user, then increasingly hinder the user experience to eventually block any video playback at its ultimate state. Now, there’s even more punishment on the way: the new change makes the entire website subject to artificial slowdowns, which YouTube referred it as “suboptimal viewing.”
This is reported by multiple users on Reddit – and according to 9to5Google’s testing, if YouTube detects ad blockers in use, the experience is best described as borderline unusable. The artificial slowdowns include “incredibly slow” video buffering, video previews refusing to load properly, and switching to Theater or Full Screen mode requiring a full webpage refresh.
So, users are now pretty much faced with two official options: stare at countless ads, or pay up. With the prices getting hiked higher than ever, let’s just say this is a battle that nobody is going to win – especially as breaking YouTube’s virtual monopoly on video-sharing platforms is next to impossible, leaving users with little choice elsewhere.
Pokdepinion: Are there people out there capable of sitting through countless ads just to watch a few videos?
