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YouTube appears to be continuing its war on ad blockers, with users complaining that the company has been slowing down the site for users it detects running an ad blocker. 9to5Google discovered this Reddit thread full of users seeing poor loading performance with ad blockers enabled.
A video at the top of the Reddit post shows what some users are seeing: A video with an ad blocker can’t load fast enough to keep up with the playback speed (which isn’t normal; it’s probably 2x) and has to stop for about 30 seconds. Turning off the ad blocker instantly improves upload performance, as the white line on YouTube’s progress bar shows a much further path to caching. Users have reported that ad blocking detection causes strange issues, such as “lag” that makes it full screen, comments not working, or Chrome being unable to load other web pages while YouTube is open.
YouTube has used all kinds of tactics to get people to turn off ad blockers and sign up for YouTube Premium. The company was previously displaying pop-up messages stating that ad blockers violated YouTube’s terms of service. Earlier, it was discovered that the company added a five-second delay to the initial loading of the site for ad blockers. These changes have set off a game of cat and mouse between Google/YouTube and the ad blocking community.
But the slowdowns could be a major accident from ad blockers changing YouTube code: Adblock Plus has published a bug report covering the “performance issues” introduced by version 3.22 and says things should be fixed in version 3.22.1. Original uBlock developer Raymond Hill He says the problem is limited to AdBlock Plus and its sub-products and that blaming YouTube is an “incorrect diagnosis.”
Regardless of whether this is due to the updated Adblock code, this is not the first time this has happened with YouTube. The immediate thing would be to show more of these popups and not send people on a wild goose chase after fake technical issues. Users in the thread are surely confused as to why YouTube stopped working suddenly. The top comment says: “I thought something was wrong with my internet connection,” while another high-profile user’s comment was that they were planning to reinstall Chrome.
This post was updated on January 15 at 4:20 PM ET with Adblock Plus bug report information and developer Raymond Hill’s statement.