YouTube has ramped its efforts to beat ad blockers by implementing a new banner that warns users that they are breaking their Terms of Service. The banner tells users that videos will not play until they either whitelist YouTube or disable their ad blocker altogether. Interestingly, the “Allow YouTube ads” button is highlighted, while the “Try YouTube Premium” option is somewhat grayed out, indicating that they are subtly trying to persuade users to enable ads.

YouTube has attempted to combat ad blockers in the past. For example, in May 2023, YouTube tested a similar message that at times had a countdown timer to imply urgency. YouTube has also tried to come up with other ideas, such as warning users that their playback would stop after they had watched 3 videos unless they disabled their ad blocker.
 

YouTube has also taken a shot at server-side ad insertion. Server-side ad insertion is when ads are inserted into the video stream at the server. This method makes it harder for ad blockers to detect the ads versus the content, making it very difficult for ad blockers to block the ads since the ads are the video.

Most of the recently reported users have been using one of Opera or Firefox browsers so it is unclear whether these users are targeted or if they have begun rolling out to everyone. There are also accounts of performance issues with Google’s own Chrome browser while ad blockers are enabled along with not many examples to substantiate hard evidence.

The ongoing battle between YouTube and ad blockers is a larger fight that content platforms have against users that want to sit and watch without interruption. And while YouTube comes up with more counter actions, users and ad blockers will adapt with sometimes ironically solutions that improve the quality of video-based ads.