I’m sure you entered YouTube today and were surprised by a banner that covered the entire screen, preventing you from clicking on your next song or podcast. This happened because you have an ad blocker activated, something Google doesn’t like. It’s the nature of living off advertising, you know how it is.
As you know, YouTube is a widely used platform that offers a variety of on-demand content. There’s a free version with ads and a paid version through a Premium subscription that removes ads and enhances video quality.
Then there’s another option, one frequently used by advanced users, which involves using ad blockers to listen to music and podcasts without encountering a single ad. This last option’s days are numbered.
Farewell to ad blockers…
Last month, we learned about an experiment in which YouTube was sending pop-ups to users of the free version to inform them that ad blockers are not allowed on the platform.
Now we can confirm that this banner has started appearing for users in Spain and other European countries. Currently, the banner appears every few songs and can be closed, but we assume that in the future, users will be required to uninstall or deactivate the ad blocker on the YouTube page.
Or goodbye to your YouTube account.
Some users are now seeing a revised version of this dialogue box, with a similar wording but with the mention of a new three-strikes policy.
Discovered by a Reddit user, the pop-up now includes three numbered white boxes, followed by a message that the video player will be blocked on three occasions.
There is also an additional sentence in the first point asking users to disable the ad blocker or risk having the video player blocked.
In this way, it appears that YouTube is going to put an end to one of the oldest and legal practices on the entire internet. The question is: will there be consequences? Probably not, but it will be interesting to see how the community reacts.
