Not so long ago, it was easy to avoid YouTube ads by installing an adblocker. Now, YouTube has upped the ante, and its fight against adblockers could endanger the very creators who use the platform as their source of revenue. But how exactly is YouTube losing the war against adblockers?
YouTube Needs You To See Their Ads
While YouTube is a content creation platform, it’s also an advertising platform. Businesses pay a lot of money to advertise on the site, and the company, in turn, inserts relevant advertising into videos that fit the topic of the ad. The problem isn’t so much the advertising (orhow long the TV ads have gotten) as it is the number of ads a user has to wait for before they get to the content they want.
When YouTube first debuted in-video ads, they occasionally placed one at the front of the video. There was a good chance that you could click on a video and not be forced to watch the first five seconds of an ad. However, this process revealed that people would click on ads, which made the company ramp up its ad distribution. Now, depending on the video length, you’ll have to wait through several “ad breaks” interspersed throughout the video.
Naturally, the increase in the number of ads meant consumers who didn’t want to see them installed adblockers on their browsers. Adblockers are extensions or programs that examine a page’s code while it loads, comparing links coming into the browser to a set of existing domains. If it finds a domain listed on its “ad list,” it’ll block the domain from loading, thereby stopping the ad.
This is a significant problem for YouTube. YouTube guarantees its advertisers that they’ll have the eyes of their audience; to do that, they ensure that ads are placed in the video at specific intervals. Adblockers remove those ads from loading and reduce the number of clicks advertisers get. With more people using those plugins and applications, YouTube had to take drastic measures to ensure it would still be a viable advertising medium. Those measures included declaring war on ads.
How YouTube Aimed to Foil Adblockers
The mission seemed simple at first: find a way to circumvent adblocking software and plugins. The first thing that YouTube did was implement some code to detect if the browser was running adblocking software or a plugin. At the start, all this would do iswarn the userthat they have an adblocker and ask them to turn it off. However, this polite approach wasn’t working, so YouTube decided to up the ante.
When the company realized that asking users to turn off their adblocker wasn’t working, it decided to block video playback for users still running an adblocker. This forced many users to choose—either leave the platform and find somewhere else to watch their videos or turn off their adblocker, leaving them vulnerable to ads when they leave the platform. The third option—allowing only YouTube to display ads—could be used, but few users seemed willing or able to allow specific sites to be permitted through their ad blocker.
Eventually, when these methods failed to work, YouTube resorted totelling users that having an adblocker was against their terms of serviceand that their YouTube account could be suspended or removed for having one. For many platform users, this was the last straw, and some simply left to seek entertainment elsewhere.
Users were unhappy about this since it removed any agency they had. The formerly free site was now inundated with ads. Many have juststopped watching YouTube altogetherand opted for other entertainment outlets. While this seemed to affect YouTube users a lot, it also had a knock-on effect on the creators who used the website for their livelihood.
Adblockers Can Hurt Content Creators, Too
Does This Mean That YouTube is Dying?
Many Internet commentators have stated that YouTube’s war with adblockers could finally kill the platform outright. The site has already implemented strategies that block dedicated programs that allow for ad-free YouTube videos. However, YouTube has offered alternatives for users who want to watch ad-free content.
YouTube Premium is the paid tier of the platform; however, at $10.99 a month, it’sa bit much for most people based on what it offers. The companyused to have a cheaper, low-cost option, but it removed that one in a push for better monetization. The truth is that while YouTube offers good content, it’s not worth the price to most users.
There have also been extensive workarounds to prevent the YouTube ad sensor from triggering, letting people watch content ad-free anyway. YouTube is probably not dying, but its monetization methodology needs a lot of work if it’s going to survive the twenty-first century.
The Adblock War Is Far From Over
If nothing else, YouTube’s own rise to prominence (and streaming services generally) shows just how willing consumers are to change their habits if something better comes along.
