Why Are Ad Blockers Suddenly Not Allowed On YouTube? The Controversial Decision And What It Means Explained

Over the last decade, YouTube has been increasing the amount of ads on the platform. These ads can appear at several stages of a video (start, middle, end) with some of them being unskippable, distracting you from the content you actually want to watch. To counter this, some users have been using ad blockers for an ad-free YouTube experience.

YouTube is not happy with this ad-free experience and is now displaying an anti-ad blocking wall pop-up banner, forcing people to disable adblockers to view any content. Here's why Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube anymore.

Why Ad Blockers Are Not Allowed On YouTube?

The platform started an anti-adblock campaign in May 2023, by testing a program that would display a message if you were using adblockers on the platform. A May 10th post by X account @Dexerto shows an early version of the warning, with the post gathering over 36,000 likes in five months (seen below, left).

In June 2023, the company adopted a strategy where the video player was disabled after someone watched 3 videos with adblock (seen below, left), as X user @Thafnine noticed.

YouTube released a major update against adblock users in October 2023, showing a pop-up message to users with the feature enabled, warning them that ad blockers are not allowed on the platform and requesting them to either disable their feature or subscribe to YouTube Premium.

On October 12th, X user @ploicky made a post that read, "Apparently the YouTube ad blocker pop up registers as a video thumbnail, and i have a browser extension that putts scott the woz everywhere," gathering over 14,000 likes in four days (seen below, left). On October 16th, X user @ShitpostRock made a post saying that only "0.6% of total users on YouTube use adblock," gathering over 27,000 likes in a day (seen below, right).

How People Reacted On Social Media?

On October 3rd, 2023, X user @PapiRavenManuel tweeted against the YouTube anti-adblock policy saying "using ad blocker on your platform is a blessing, and now this is being implemented." The post (shown below, left) amassed roughly 74 likes and 7 retweets in a week. On October 9th, X user @titanhunter143 the platform is brave to "think I'm gonna stop using AdBlock before I stop using YouTube." The tweet (shown below, right) garnered over 356 likes and 48 retweets in a week.

For the full history of the ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube trend, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.