It seems like after giving several warnings, YouTube is once again trying to convince users of adblockers to switch off the software by degrading their viewing experience on the platform. News comes in now if you skip ‘ads’, your YouTube videos land straight to the end and occasionally play clips without audio.
Experts suggest that YouTube had already been fighting a battle against ad blockers. Earlier it tried to limit the number of videos that users could watch and delayed video loading. Now it looks like YouTube/Google’s latest strategy against adblocking fans includes skipping videos straight to the end.
Updates you can’t skip!
Complaints came that this week, many have noticed that YouTube videos were suddenly skipping straight to the end of the video. “Even if the video is just replayed, it skips straight to the end almost immediately,” a user explained.
Some suggested that this might be a strange phenomenon and this only appears to be happening for users with an adblocker installed. Further reports suggest that when users disabled the blocker, everything worked as normal.
Users also reported that the glitch happened when the video was replayed. One added that ‘if you try to skip to a certain part of the video, it just endlessly loads in some cases.”
What’s next?
Critics argued that the new glitch might be affecting only the Adblock/Adblock Plus users. Case in point, uBlock Origin users explained that they aren’t experiencing any problems with YouTube videos.
In January, many reports explained that users of Adblock and Adblock Plus were finding that YouTube was being laggy and unresponsive. Initially, YouTube’s tried warning people through popups that using ad blockers violates its terms of service. YouTube even tried to disable the software or go Premium to continue.
However, in November YouTube’s previous ad-blocking methods shifted from the experimental stage to a full-blown global effort. It is expected that YouTube tried to stop users from avoiding long ads or make them sign up for YouTube Premium by ‘preventing them from viewing content.’
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