YouTube tries video blocker for those who stop ads. Either you pay for YouTube Premium or you get ads. Tertium non datur. And so the ultimatum of Google’s video platform slowly creeps in, with a small test for a few subscribers, but that’s enough to trigger the alarm among Reddit users, who immediately shared the new popup window that is allegedly appearing in these hours to the sly ones of the Internet.
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“You appear to be using an ad blocker,” reads the warning, so “video playback will be blocked unless YouTube is whitelisted or the ad blocker is disabled.” Unless a magic from the developers who made these apps, it seems there is no longer a choice for those who until now managed to avoid advertisements in YouTube videos through this ploy.
A virtue of necessity
That of YouTube is not a spite but a choice also dictated by the fact that, data in hand, in the last three months the revenues of the platform tend to fall (-2.6% on an annual basis). On the other hand, the 500 hours of videos uploaded to the platform every minute that Google announced in 2021 are no joke to anyone, even for giants like this.
If there are advertisements, then it is because what is obtained from them is also used to pay for the servers: this is how “ads allow YouTube to remain free for billions of users around the world”. Alternatively – the notification continues – the advertisements can be circumvented legally by activating the YouTube Premium subscription (which currently costs €11.99 per month in Italy), with which the company would also pay the salaries of the content creators.
As we said for now it is only an experiment that would be reaching only a few subscribers around the world; it will be used to understand if this aggressive approach will bear fruit. Because the message is clear: if you don’t disable the ad blocker, after three videos YouTube itself will completely disable the video player.
