Last year, YouTube launched an aggressive campaign against ad blockers in October, following an initial small-scale experiment in June. Now, many months later, the crackdown is expanding.
YouTube has announced that it will begin enforcing its anti-ad blocking policy on third-party apps that violate YouTube’s Terms of Service. YouTube specifically calls out “ad-blocking programs” on this occasion, although we assume that third-party players with built-in ad-blocking could also be a target.
Regarding ad blocking apps, ones like AdGuard allow you to open YouTube inside the ad blocking app, where you can watch videos without ads. This will no longer be possible. If you try to use this solution, you will see an error message saying “The following content is not available on this application”.
YouTube emphasizes that its terms don’t allow third-party apps to turn off ads “because it prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership, and ads on YouTube help support creators and keep billions of people around the world using the streaming service.”
As always, YouTube unsurprisingly suggests that you start paying for YouTube Premium if you don’t like ads.