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In a bid to push revenues,YouTubehas long tried to convince its users to switch to the$14/month Premium tier. Failing to do so would result in viewers having to sit through ads, with YouTube at one point even testing up to eleven unskippable ads, although the subsequent backlash led the company toend this experiment. As for people who continue to use workarounds, like using ad blockers, the streaming platform had some other plans, including, but not limited to,slowing down load times.
YouTube is now seemingly bringing back this particular anti-ad block campaign, as noted by Reddit userNightMean. Several other users on thethreadconcur, with some reportedly mistaking the slowdown for reduced internet speeds. The load times reportedly improve significantly when the ad blocker is disabled.
The folks at9to5Googletried this out on their own and faced slow buffering and found that even going into full screen or theater mode wasn’t possible, requiring a page refresh. Moreover, the site found that some of the previews refused to load properly in this state.
In a statement back in November, a spokesperson for YouTube confirmed that some users with ad block could witness “suboptimal viewing,” referring to slow loading times on the platform. It’s likely that YouTube is beginning to expand this behavior to more users. While some lucky users might be able to circumvent this new restriction, YouTube is likely to come up with more ways to compel users to disable ad blockers or fork out $14 per month for Premium.
YouTube’s fight against ad blockers was supercharged in 2023, with the platform trying out multiple new methods to discourage their use. Thefirst experimentappeared right around the time ofGoogle I/O in May, wherein users were shown a banner prompting them to disable ad block (allow ads) or try out the Premium subscription.
We then stumbled upon amore aggressivethree-strikespolicy, disabling the video player altogether after three videos. This was replaced by a timer some weeks later that served asimilar purpose. It was pretty clear at the time that YouTube hadn’t settled on a way to get users on board the Premium tier or convince them to turn off the ad blocking software. While slowing down load times could be one way to get users just annoyed enough to make the switch, only time will tell if the company will be successful in itslengthy battle against ad block software.
UPDATE: 2025-06-22 13:31 EST BY CHETHAN RAO
Statement from YouTube
In a statement toAndroid Central, YouTube said these slowdowns are unrelated to its campaign against ad blockers. Here’s the statement in full:
“Recent reports of users experiencing loading delays on YouTube are unrelated to our ad blocker detection efforts. Our help center offers troubleshooting tips for users experiencing issues.”
Separately, the developer of uBlock Origin, Raymond Hill, shared on X that slowdowns and performance issues could be related to the updated versions of Adblock Plus (v3.22) and AdBlock (v5.17) extensions. Hill points out that these problems could impact other services as well, and not just YouTube.
