Word on the street is that YouTube is cracking down heavily on ad blockers. Videos absolutely will not play if you don’t disable/whitelist. I intensely abhor watching YouTube with ads, especially when videos are less than five minutes. If I had to watch a 30-second commercial before a three-minute music video, I would just skip both entirely. More than any other streaming service, YouTube is where I spend most of my viewing time. A smooth experience with zero ad interruptions is kind of important (first world problems).
Over the years, browser ad-blocking extensions have done well to keep the YouTube ad machine in check. However, even before this latest crackdown, YouTube has been doing whack-a-mole on the extensions for a long time. It would work fine one day, then the next you’re suddenly seeing ads on videos, wondering why your ad blocker isn’t doing its magic. The solution is to switch to another one, and if that also gets whacked, then to another. Perhaps you’ll end up back to the ad blocker you started with, because it's received an update to combat the YouTube shenanigans.
Frustrated by this, I picked the obvious solution to the problem: pay for YouTube Premium. I bet that’s what YouTube hopes to achieve with its latest crusade against ad blockers: get more folks to pay up. At a not cheap $14 per month, I get the full YouTube experience completely ad-free. Best of all, I can watch videos on my Apple TV’s built-in YouTube app, also without ads. It’s not possible to run an ad-blocker on TV apps, so prior to subscribing, I avoided watching YouTube on my much larger (than a laptop screen) LG TV. These days, a majority of my YouTube time is on the TV.
Crack down on ad blockers all you want, Google. I am chilling over here. The people complaining about it are sitting in the cheap(skate) seats.
A San Francisco classic.