YouTube videos might skip to the end if you use an adblocker

Published May 27th, 2024 9:03PM EDT

Image: José Adorno for BGR

YouTube’s war on adblockers has been well-documented over the last several months, but it’s taken a frustrating new twist for users still attempting to block ads on the popular video platform. According to reports from Reddit (via 9to5Google), YouTube’s latest tactic appears to be forcing videos to skip to the end right away when a user has an adblocker enabled.

Based on several comments, YouTube videos are randomly skipping to the end as soon as they load. When the users try to replay the video, it skips to the end again. Clicking at a random point in the video timeline also causes the video to load infinitely.

“Yes, this is exactly my issue. They’re making this algorithm where if they detect an adblocker, it causes this to happen,” The-Kabster-Cow speculates. “It’s to make it seem like some sort of bug caused by the adblocker, but it’s definitely intentional by [YouTube], since they know they aren’t allowed to directly tell us to stop using the adblocker.”

There’s no proof that this is what’s happening, but the problem is widespread enough that it’s clearly either a legitimate bug or a fresh attempt by YouTube to eliminate ad blocking. That said, many users claim that the video skipping still happens after they turn off or pause their adblocker, so there might actually be something an issue behind the scenes.

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It’s worth remembering that a bug introduced in an Adblock Plus update was mistaken for a YouTube scheme to punish users blocking ads earlier this year. Adblock Plus fixed the bug in version 3.22.1. We should probably wait to see if this is a similar occurrence.

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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