Other Technology | July 5, 2023
YouTube wants everyone to start paying for YouTube Premium, and they have grown tired of asking politely. Their latest plan is the most aggressive in their history, to the point where they may disable video playback for users who block ads and refuse to pay €11.99 per month.
The new experiment, officially confirmed by YouTube, involves users potentially being blocked from the platform if they are caught bypassing ads that appear before and during the videos they want to watch. The only way to avoid this is by subscribing to YouTube Premium.
Reddit users were the first to discover this new feature. It consists of a new screen that appears if you are using an ad-blocker on YouTube, informing the user that they will be blocked after watching three videos without disabling the ad-blocker.
The screen appears if YouTube detects that the web browser has an ad-blocking extension installed. In that case, the page allows only the playback of three videos with the ad-blocker active. After those three videos, the player will stop working, and users won’t be able to watch more YouTube videos. The only solution in that case is to disable the ad-blocker or add YouTube to the whitelist to allow it to function on the site.
To justify blocking users, YouTube reminds users that it is a free service for billions of users worldwide. However, it also indicates that if the user doesn’t want ads, they can avoid them by paying for YouTube Premium, an option through which video creators will receive a portion of the subscription fee. It’s evident that YouTube wants to improve the monetization of its service by encouraging both ad views and subscriptions to YouTube Premium.
This screen clearly attempts to instill fear in users, although it’s not clear if YouTube will actually go ahead and expel users or if it will remain a mere warning. After Bleeping Computer reported on user complaints, the company tried to calm things down, promising that this measure is only for “extreme cases” and that they will only block users if they repeatedly ignore the requests, although they haven’t specified where exactly the limit lies.
In any case, this is just an experiment being shown to a few users, but it’s not the first time YouTube has sparked controversy due to a similar test. The company had to backtrack when it seemed like they were going to charge for 4K resolution, clarifying that it was another experiment. However, they did introduce a higher-quality 1080p Premium resolution. Therefore, it is highly likely that YouTube will start blocking accounts that use ad-blockers, although not as aggressively as in this experiment.
