YouTube has declared war on ad blockers. The company behind the video, streaming, and music platform has already cracked down on ad-blocking extensions and even third-party apps in an effort to render ad blockers useless.

But its new strategy is even more aggressive: Ads will be integrated directly into videosso much so that it is impossible to block them in this way and prevent their proliferation, at least in theory.

YouTube starts integrating ads into videos to prevent users from blocking them

To implement this measure against ad blockers, YouTube is changing the way video playback (and ads) work on the platform. Until now, videos played as separate content from the video itself; they played before, during, or after the video we actually wanted to watch.

But YouTube’s new idea is to integrate these videos directly into the video, injecting the ad at the server level. That’s why ad blockers They will not be able to separate content and block advertisingThe measure was announced a few months ago, but the effects of this significant change to the platform are now starting to be felt by the first users.

A group of Reddit users have used an extension to block ads to prevent YouTube videos from being played anymore. show completely black screen during adSo if there is a 30-second ad in the middle of the video, users see a black screen for those 30 seconds.

Image via Reddit.

In a way, the ad blocker still works because it detects enough of its content to hide it. But, It is not possible to skip the ad means there is still an interruption for the user (or multiple interruptions in videos with multiple ads) to continue the original video.

Ads are one of the main sources of revenue for YouTube and Google in general, so it makes sense that the company is trying to discourage the use of ad blockers and instead offer users the ability to subscribe to YouTube Premium to avoid seeing ads and enjoy other benefits. While some users enjoy these benefits, others choose not to pay for whatever reason, and in these cases it is now very difficult to avoid seeing ads using tools such as extensions.

Cover photo | Rashidul Islam on Unsplash (edited)

via | Mashable

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