Over the past week, people on social media have been complaining of YouTube videos that have unskippable ads with runtimes that are up to 3 hours in length. While it might sound a bit unbelievable, the video platform has been trying new ways of discouraging ad blockers on its site for some time now. While the company didn’t admit to any specific punitive behavior for users employing ad blockers, its answer did seem to hint at what’s going on, if you read between the lines: “We’ve launched a global effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.” Ads that are not able to be skipped are supposed to be limited to 15 seconds, so something is definitely wrong. Previously, the company has injected ads straight into videos so that ad blockers can’t detect them, as well as using pop-ups to block users with ad blockers from watching videos at all. Google Chrome as a whole has also started disabling certain ad blockers, thanks to a controversial change to the API extension developers use. If you notice an unskippable multi-hour ad on YouTube, try disabling your ad blocker to see if that fixes the problem. If it does, you might then want to try watching the video again in incognito mode to see if the issue is linked to your account — this should help you diagnose what’s going on so you can more easily know what to do next.
YouTube is Taking Its Crusade Against Ad Blockers To a Whole New Level
Over the past week, people on social media have been complaining of YouTube videos that have unskippable ads with runtimes that are up to 3 hours in length. While it might sound a bit unbelievable, the video platform has been trying new ways of discouraging ad blockers on its site for some time now. While the company didn’t admit to any specific punitive behavior for users employing ad blockers, its answer did seem to hint at what’s going on, if you read between the lines: “We’ve launched a global effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.” Ads that are not able to be skipped are supposed to be limited to 15 seconds, so something is definitely wrong. Previously, the company has injected ads straight into videos so that ad blockers can’t detect them, as well as using pop-ups to block users with ad blockers from watching videos at all. Google Chrome as a whole has also started disabling certain ad blockers, thanks to a controversial change to the API extension developers use. If you notice an unskippable multi-hour ad on YouTube, try disabling your ad blocker to see if that fixes the problem. If it does, you might then want to try watching the video again in incognito mode to see if the issue is linked to your account — this should help you diagnose what’s going on so you can more easily know what to do next.