YouTube's New Strategy to Combat Ad Blockers: Integrating Ads into Video Streams

YouTube is reportedly developing another way to counter third-party ad blockers, as the video streaming platform aims to increase revenue from users who don't subscribe to YouTube Premium. Speculations suggest that this change may integrate the video and ad streams, preventing popular browser plugins from blocking these ads. This news comes weeks after users reported videos automatically skipping to the end when using third-party ad blockers on the Alphabet-owned platform.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), SponsorBlock, a plugin that skips past sponsored sections of YouTube videos, claims that YouTube is merging ads directly into the video stream. Currently, videos and ads are separate elements, and the player pauses the video to display ads at specific timestamps.

With this change, the video stream would be continuous, potentially rendering third-party ad blockers ineffective, according to SponsorBlock. The open-source browser extension mentioned that it may not function properly if server-side ads are introduced, as "all timestamps are offset by the ad times."

Users with ad blockers enabled reported an issue last month where videos started to skip to the end automatically. On the YouTube subreddit, a user shared that they could not watch videos when an ad blocker was turned on. Additionally, attempts to skip to certain sections of the video resulted in automatic fast-forwarding to the end.

In instances where some users managed to bypass this issue, the audio playback vanished. This meant that while the video was watchable, the audio was missing.

This effort is speculated to be part of YouTube's broader initiative against ad blockers. According to the video-streaming platform, these programs, often presented as browser plugins, violate the terms of service of its API services.