Key Takeaways
- YouTube is intensifying its crackdown on third-party ad blocker apps, which violate its Terms of Service.
- YouTube Premium offers an official ad-free solution for users who want to avoid ads.
- Ad blocker crackdowns remain controversial but ever-present within the industry.
YouTube is doubling down on its efforts to squash third-party apps that block ads on the platform. The company has reiterated that such apps violate its Terms of Service, and users of such services will begin to experience buffering issues and error messages on screen.
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“We only allow third-party apps to use our API when they follow our API Services Terms of Service, and when we find an app that violates these terms, we will take appropriate action to protect our platform, creators, and viewers,” says YouTube in a blog post.
YouTube’s campaign against third party ad blockers isn’t new — last year saw the streamer intensify its efforts to get people to stop using ad blocking apps and browser extensions.
For users of the platform who don’t want to deal with ads, the company does have an official solution in the form of YouTube Premium. The monthly subscription offers perks including ad-free videos, and it’s clear that this is the direction the Google-owned company wants its viewer base to migrate towards.
A game of cat and mouse
YouTube’s intensifying efforts to crack down on ad blocking is entirely unsurprising. The last number of years have seen the rise of the subscription business model, and every video streamer naturally wants a piece of that lucrative pie.
YouTube Premium is a competent subscription service, with its offline video watching, picture-in-picture mode, and access to music streaming in the form of YouTube Music. That being said, it’s hard not to look at YouTube’s latest crackdown without a dose of cynicism.
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YouTube’s parent company is Google, whose business model relies on the existence of advertisements, and whose Chrome web browser has had a tumultuous relationship with ad blocking extensions over the years.
The result has been a sort of arms race in which ad blockers are always being updated to bypass new restrictions put upon them by Google. The latest such restriction is expected to land in June, which will have consequences for the entire ad blocker ecosystem of Chrome.
While ad blockers on the web continue to function for the time being, the mobile ecosystem is more restrictive by nature and YouTube has been successful in taking down some third party clients over time.
There’s still a number of third party YouTube apps on the market, and so we’ll have to wait and see just how far the streamer wants to take this battle.
