YouTube might slow down your videos if you block ads – PCWorld

Image: T. Schneider/Shutterstock.com It’s fairly easy to block the constant, incessant advertising that appears on YouTube. Google would prefer that you don’t, or pay up (quite a lot) to make them go away. Last weekend, the company started its latest campaign to try and badger ad-block users into disabling their extensions. Since then, it looks like YouTube has escalated things and is now intentionally slowing down videos. Posters on Reddit and the Brave browser forum have observed videos being blacked out on first load, approximately for the length of pre-roll ads, with a pop-up link that directs users to the ad-blocking section of this technical support page. “Check whether your browser extensions that block ads are affecting video playback,” suggests Google. “As another option, try opening YouTube in an incognito window with all extensions disabled and check if the issue continues.” PCWorld staff has seen this in action, using uBlock Origin Lite. Google Ad-block extension developers quickly got around the pop-up issue earlier this week, with one AdGuard representative calling the process “a classic cat-and-mouse game.” But if Google wanted to instigate a more serious crackdown on users blocking ads without paying up, it could do so easily—and we’ve seen
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