YouTube may slow down ad block users on purpose

Another round in the eternal showdown

Marco Wutz | Jan 15, 2024

YouTube may slow down ad block users on purpose /

It looks like YouTube is fielding another weapon in its eternal war against ad block users. People noticed that the site wasn’t working like usual all of a sudden, as if their internet connection was slow, while others found that their CPU usage suddenly jumped up when visiting the platform – in some cases this seems to have outright crashed their browser when using Chrome. Users flocked to Reddit to share their findings, where many others were able to confirm the reports.

A report by 9to5google was able to verify the theory that an enabled ad blocker leads to several kinds of problems on YouTube: Buffering being unreasonably slow, previews not loading, and a refresh being necessary to get features like fullscreen mode to work. In short: It’s an annoying nightmare. The report states that “an artificial timeout written within YouTube’s code to act as a laggy internet connection” is responsible for all this.

YouTube's war with ad blockers continues / YouTube

Though frustrating, these measures are harmless compared to the spike caused in CPU usage, which may lead to overheating in low-end devices or could cause problems when you’re running YouTube while you’re in a game. Worse, according to PCGamer’s findings this particular issue seems to affect YouTube Premium users who simply have an ad blocker installed as well, so this may actually be a case of anti-ad block measures backfiring. While YouTube Premium is ideally what the company wants to pressure viewers into subscribing to with its crusade, in the most optimal case it would like to destroy ad blockers entirely.

YouTube previously tried to wean people off ad blockers by confronting them with a message about such apps violating the terms of service and stopping videos from working unless they disabled their ad blockers. However, the creators of these apps always have countermeasures up their sleeves, leading to an arms race with tech giant Google that seems to get rougher as time goes on.

Published Jan 15, 2024

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg