YouTube slowing down load times for users with ad blockers

Published Jan 15th, 2024 6:50PM EST

Image: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

YouTube began waging war against ad blockers last year in an attempt to force users to either sign up for a YouTube Premium subscription or actually watch the ads they were being served. Most popular ad blockers have since been updated to bypass the crackdown, but YouTube is refusing to back down from the persistent ad blockers.

On Saturday, a trending post on Reddit showed a YouTube video starting to buffer whenever a user enabled the AdBlock extension. Hundreds of Redditors chimed in with similar complaints, while some said they figured it was an issue with their internet connection.

9to5Google tested the reports by visiting YouTube with and without an ad blocker enabled. They found that the site was indeed significantly slower when using an ad blocker. Not only did videos buffer more slowly, but previews didn’t load correctly and it was impossible to enter full screen or theater mode without refreshing the entire site.

According to 9to5Google, this is happening due to “an artificial timeout written within YouTube’s code to act as a laggy internet connection.” This has been present in the code for quite a while, but it appears that YouTube has been using it more liberally lately.

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If you use an ad blocker extension like AdBlock Plus, uBlock Origin, or Ghostery and you’re having trouble with YouTube lately, you might want to try turning it off. YouTube would clearly prefer for everyone to pay $13.99⁠ a month for YouTube Premium. Anyone who doesn’t will be fighting to avoid ads on YouTube for the foreseeable future.

Jacob Siegal is Associate Editor at BGR, having joined the news team in 2013. He has over a decade of professional writing and editing experience, and helps to lead our technology and entertainment product launch and movie release coverage.

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