No, not by purchasing YouTube Premium. Just press F5.
YouTube is stepping up its fight against ad blockers in an attempt to encourage users to buy a paid Premium subscription that removes ads. However, users are finding ways to circumvent the restrictions, and Google is continuing to increase its pressure, which could ultimately lead to the opposite effect – even greater popularity of blockers.
Last year, the company began actively combating blockers, for example, by artificially slowing down video playback in browsers other than Chrome and Edge.
Then, in the spring of 2024, YouTube users began seeing a warning message more and more often that they couldn’t watch videos with a blocker. Soon, YouTube began automatically skipping videos when a blocker was detected, though this was later revealed to be a bug unrelated to blockers. Eventually, YouTube began injecting ads server-side, embedding them directly into the video stream, making them harder to block.
The latest round of confrontation was user reports of a black screen, emerging for a few seconds before the video starts playing. This problem affected users of various browsers, including Firefox, Edge, and Vivaldi. A temporary solution was to refresh the page (press F5). Blocker developers also did not stand aside and released updates that block the “black screen”.
Some experts believe that Google’s push could backfire and scare off potential YouTube Premium subscribers, forcing them to look for more effective ways to combat intrusive ads.
