Ads are a double-edged sword online. On the one hand, they provide platforms such as this one with some means to make money and keep our lights on. On the other hand, they can be overwhelming, annoying and, quite often, a significant addition to your already high data consumption which, subsequently, means more data costs on your end.
The same can be said of YouTube, the one platform where we all flock to get our video fixes – check out our channel while you’re there.
On YouTube, ads, be they big banners on the home feed, small ones just below the video, interstitial ads on smartphones and tablets, ones that appear when you’re watching a video or those that show up as you transition from one to the other, can be both overwhelming and annoying. So overwhelming and annoying to the point that many users have devised various ways of getting rid of them.
One of the most popular ways of doing so is the ad blockers that also block ads from other corners of the world wide web. Now, these ad blockers, it appears, might no longer be welcome on the platform.
A Redditor recently encountered a page asking them to either allow ads or subscribe to YouTube Premium, YouTube’s ad-free service (which remains officially unavailable in Kenya).
Per an update posted on the same YouTube subreddit, the page encountered is part of tests being run by the YouTube team that may one day see the light of the day with a full-on sitewide global rollout.
On mobile devices where add-ons are not available on most browsers, users resort to using third-party apps (like the now-dead YouTube Vanced) that allow them to block ads. As can be expected, these apps are usually not available through the Google Play Store.
Do you think this is a good move by YouTube to block ad-blockers?
