YouTube began its fight against ad blockers late last year, and the company has now started targeting third-party ad-blocking apps. Initially, the pushback was more focused on actual ad blockers that allowed users to bypass ads without a YouTube Premium subscription. But that was more the case on PC with users streaming through the YouTube website.
YouTube then issued a “strong warning” to users to stop using ad blockers. Which eventually got a response from the user. Some have complained about slow loading videos. Although YouTube later said it didn’t slow down videos for users who had ad blockers active. Its latest initiative appears to target third-party ad-blocking apps that stream YouTube content. Such ReVanced. As for YouTube, the company says apps like ReVanced violate its terms of service because they allow a user to turn off ads, and turning off ads prevents creators from being rewarded for views.
“We want to emphasize that our terms don’t allow third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership, and YouTube ads help support creators and enable billions of people around the world to use the streaming service,” YouTube said in a support post. .
Users viewing YouTube through third-party ad-blocking applications may experience buffering
The big change for users who still watch videos through these apps on Android or iOS will likely be the quality degradation. YouTube specifically states that users watching through these apps may experience buffering. They can also see an error stating that the content they are trying to watch is not available in that app. YouTube very clearly wants people to pay for YouTube Premium.
And this is another step in the hope that it can convince users to pay that subscription. This is meant to be an ad-free experience for those who don’t want to see ads at all. But apps like ReVanced have until now given users a way around that. YouTube also says it will begin cracking down on apps that violate its rules. For now, it appears that users may end up with slow video loading. Or some videos cannot be watched at all.
But in the future, some of these apps may no longer be able to use YouTube’s API.