Google confirms YouTube update may affect ad blockers

Google released a statement this Friday (14), confirms that the latest update has been approved YouTube Ad blockers may affect it. The company made it clear that ad blockers violate the platform’s terms of service and asked users to stop using such tools or subscribe to Premium plan.

Late last month, YouTube users using ad blockers reported various issues with watching videos. At the time, some suspected some kind of error; This went away when they noticed that playback returned to normal as soon as the blockers were disabled.

Now Google officially acknowledges that the outages are a company strategy to discourage the use of ad blockers.

“Ads help support the creators you love and enable billions of people around the world to use the streaming service. By blocking YouTube ads, you’re violating our Terms of Service. If you use an ad blocker, we’ll ask you to allow ads or sign up for YouTube Premium. If you continue to use these tools, we may block your video from playing.” says the company.

Server-side ads and limited offline access

YouTube appears to be developing a number of methods to combat ad blockers. According to developers SponsorBlogThe platform is testing the penetration of ads directly into the server.

This measure renders useless such complements, which no longer define the beginning and end of sponsor segments, thus losing the ability to automatically ignore them.

Another new YouTube procedure concerns limiting access for unauthenticated users. The NewPipe GitHub team reported that the platform is asking some users to log in to watch videos. The message asks the person to confirm that they are not a bot.

In theory, YouTube is exploring the possibility of operating like other streaming services that only allow authenticated accounts to view content. This may negatively impact third-party applications and affect the way videos on the platform are accessed online.