For those who have been running YouTube on a browser for a while with an ad blocker enabled, you must have come across YouTube's banner that stops a video playing in its track and warns users not to use such content blockers.
In the banner, Google says that "Adblockers violate YouTube's Terms of Service" as it encourages users to disable such content blockers or switch to YouTube Premium, which is a paid subscription which removes ads from the video platform. The company is also said to be working on server-side ads to make blocking them even harder.
As mentioned above, this saga is anything but new. There were accusations back in 2023 that Google was purposefully slowing down YouTube on Firefox, though Google denied it and also explained why that wasn't the case. A similar thing happened a few months later with people again pointing fingers towards Google. However, the search once again came out not guilty as Adblock admitted it was a fault on its end. There were also allegations that Google was hiding the "skip ad" button although Google once again claimed innocence.
Here's what the banner says:
Ad blockers violate YouTube's Terms of Service
- It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Video playback is blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled.
- Ads allow YouTube to be used by billions worldwide.
- You can go ad-free with YouTube Premium, and creators can still get paid from your subscription.
Allow YouTube Ads
Try YouTube Premium
It looks like the nagging banner is back again at least on Opera's browsers as Neowin noticed it today. We are unsure if this is happening in other regions too or if it is just India-specific. However, there are complaints about it on the OperaGX subreddit (link1, link2) as well as on the YouTube subreddit.
When I came across this, the first thing I tried was to disable and re-enable uBlock Origin, and thereafter, I updated the extension's filtering engine since it often helps with bypassing this YouTube anti-adblock banner. However, those did not help at all.
Following that, I turned off Opera's native content filtering add-on called "Privacy Protection" and this one did the trick. Therefore it looks like the built-in Opera adblocker is what is causing the issue.
After Opera, I checked Brave since it also comes with a native content blocker in the form of "Brave Shields". I tried the same video here and it played without issue. As usual, though, you have to make sure that the "Block scripts" option inside the Brave Shields is toggled off or else the YouTube website won't load properly and the video thumbnails will only display themselves as white windows.
There are also similar reports for Firefox but I must add I did not experience this, yet, although I have been noticing YouTube asset-loading issues with AdGuard. On the other hand, Google's own Chrome has exhibited sluggish performance for the last couple of days with uBlock Origin.
Therefore, it looks like different adblockers are getting affected by different sort of issues as Google keeps trying to make YouTube adblocking very difficult, if not impossible.
As an online publication, Neowin too relies on ads for operating costs and, if you use an ad blocker, we'd appreciate being whitelisted. In addition, we have an ad-free subscription for $28 a year, which is another way to show support!
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