Google Tightens Grip on YouTube: Third-Party Ad Blockers Targeted

Abubakar Mohammed

Updated: April 16, 2024

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Image Courtesy: Shutterstock

In Short

YouTube may stop working if you have Ad-blockers installed.
Google is cracking down on third-party YouTube apps and Ad Blockers that go against its Terms of Service.
The search giant has encouraged users to get YouTube Premium for an Ad-free experience.

Google has lately increased its efforts to crack down on third-party apps and services that block Ads on YouTube. Google has announced that it will now strictly go against Ad blockers that go against its terms of service.

The Google-owned platform announced today that it’s “Strengthening its enforcement on third-party apps that violate the platform’s terms of service, specifically ad-blocking apps,”. And viewers using them may “experience buffering issues” or encounter the error, “The following content is not available on this app” when trying to watch a video.

YouTube premium — Image Courtesy: Shutterstock

YouTube states they’re doing so because “We want to emphasize that our terms don’t allow third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership”. The platform has also encouraged users to buy YouTube Premium subscriptions for an “Ad-free experience”.

To put these changes to the test, we installed a few popular Ad-block extensions such as uBlock and AdBlock. It looks like YouTube has yet to block these services. We also tried Brave, one of the most popular browsers around for blocking any type of Ads but to no avail. The videos played well without issues.

Abubakar Mohammed

Abubakar covers Tech on Beebom. Hailing from a Computer Science background, the start of his love for Tech dates back to 2011, when he was gifted a Dell Inspiron 5100. When he's not covering Tech, you'll find him binge-watching anime and Tech content on YouTube, hunting heads in competitive FPS games, or exploring Teyvat in Genshin Impact. He has previously worked for leading publications such as Fossbytes, How-To Geek, and Android Police.

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