YouTube slows down videos for ad blockers, prepares more 30-second unskippable ads

YouTube continues its war on ad blockers, recently showing a notice that confirms videos are slightly slowed down for ad blocker users, while the platform is preparing for longer ad formats. Earlier this year, YouTube users with an active ad blocker started noticing that videos would load more slowly. The page would be laggy, unresponsive, and overall just not function as intended. YouTube later attributed this to a bug in a popular ad blocker, but something similar has just popped up again. Recently, YouTube users with an ad blocker installed have noticed that videos seem to buffer more than usual. A pop-up was also spotted which apparently links to a YouTube support page, and directly to a portion of the page that warns against ad blockers. On that page, YouTube says: Check whether your browser extensions that block ads are affecting video playback. As another option, try opening YouTube in an incognito window with all extensions disabled and check if the issue continues. This combination of events could easily be read as “YouTube is intentionally slowing down videos for users with an ad blocker,” and that’s certainly possible. But, as the situation in January showed, the problem could easily be
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