YouTube began cracking down on ad-blockers on desktop as early as last year and back in 2022, it made sure to shut down YouTube Vanced, an App that offered paid YouTube features for free. Now, the company has furthered its crackdown on third-party ad blockers by restricting access to YouTube content for those who use ad blockers to skip advertisements.
YouTube said that it’s “Strengthening its enforcement on third-party apps that violate the platform’s terms of service, specifically ad-blocking apps.” In addition, viewers using such third-party ad blockers may “experience buffering issues” or encounter the error, “The following content is not available on this app” when trying to play a video.
This would ensure that third-party ad blockers, which are often used on mobile, won’t be able to serve their primary purpose, which is to skip ads on the platform. “We want to emphasize that our terms don’t allow third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership”, said YouTube in the post.
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Moreover, YouTube has also encouraged users to buy YouTube Premium subscriptions for an “Ad-free experience” rather than relying on ad blockers. The streaming service says that it only allows third-party apps to use their API when they follow YouTube’s API Services Terms of Service.
Using ad blockers significantly impacts YouTube’s monetisation strategy for both the creators and the service itself. Blocking such unethical methods of watching ad-free content on the platform would allow YouTube to lure in a good amount of new subscribers for YouTube Premium and at the same time, it would also force users to watch content with ads if they don’t want to subscribe, which is also beneficial for the service.