That Youtube The fact that it has a reputation for ad blockers is something it doesn’t even bother to hide at the moment, especially since it announced a crackdown on them last April. The video platform has reportedly made it so that users who have ad blocking enabled cannot see or enjoy the videos, causing them to skip straight to the end, or mute their audio to annoy those playing in the background .

Although YouTube is trying to remove ad blockers, the fact is that the results it has obtained so far have not been entirely satisfactory, as the measures it has used seem to have affected users of blockers such as Adblock and Adblock Plus , but not those of uBlock Origin, which is perhaps the most used solution in its segment. On the other hand, users have other means to end the same thing in a different way.

As expected, the less than satisfactory results are not going to discourage YouTube, on the contrary. According to SponsorBlock, a plugin that allows you to block sponsored segments in videos published on the Google platform, the company is working on a server-side ad insertion mechanism that would result in them being inside the videos themselves and theoretically harder to block.

SponsorBlock has published several Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) explaining what YouTube’s new experiment is all about and how it plans to combat it. To this end, he explained that “if YouTube displays any user interface, such as a clickable link, that means it needs to know the duration of the ad. SponsorBlock was also able to find this data. There is also a feature to click on the timestamp in the comment, which would need to know the length of the ad, so you should be able to find it somewhere, although it might be a little difficult.”

As for the current situation, the people responsible for the plugin explain that “streaming online video today uses a ‘playlist’ of video fragments. These fragments are self-rendered videos, so they can be easily swapped or joined. This also means that the ad blocker can ignore specific snippets if it knows which ones to ignore.” On the blocker level, he didn’t hesitate to mention the use of uBlock Origin over Firefoxbecause Mozilla chose not to swallow the most controversial parts of the V3 Manifesto since the V2 Manifesto ended.

In a nutshell, SponsorBlock does not consider it impossible to block ads from the YouTube server because you can find out where they are located, but we’ll see if the blockers eventually manage to get ahead of the Alphabet subsidiary and ensure that their plans to remove ad blockers backfire again.

When it comes to legitimately watching ad-free videos on YouTube, the solution is the same as always: sign up for their Premium plan. However, the price of 11.99 euros per month for the mentioned subscription plan is high for many, so the platform may want to make more plans available with a more modular approach, so that the user only pays for what he really needs.

Cover image created by artificial intelligence.