Google says YouTube’s recent slowdown is not due to use of ad-blockers

We know that Google has been doing a lot lately in order to stop people from using ad-blockers on its platforms such as YouTube and Google Search where most of their revenue is made when people see those ads. In order to not lose revenue and make people bypass ads, YouTube has also introduced a premium program named YouTube Premium where you will not get ads and the revenue will be shared by YouTube with the creators of these videos. However, this might not be enough for YouTube to be sustainable as ads earn them much more than the YouTube Premium fees.

To do that, and it is known that not everyone will subscribe to YouTube Premium, Google has started blocking recommendations for those who are using ad-blockers. But recently, it was seen that YouTube was slowing down for people who were using ad-blockers. Now, Google has said that the recent slowdown of YouTube is not because of ad-blockers.

Reddit users reported that “People using ad blockers faced issues like slow previews and features like fullscreen and theater mode refusing to play nice. It turns out the fix was a simple one: just ditch the ad blocker, and suddenly everything loaded up at normal speed again.” Now, this is definitely strange but developers of some popular ad-blockers have now reported that the problem is not with Google or YouTube but with these ad-blockers which is why you are seeing faster load times while disabling these ad-blockers.

However, the conspiracy theories started because “YouTube has been throwing punches in its ongoing battle against ad blockers. In its latest jab, the service is waving a big red flag, saying ad blockers are a violation of its terms of service”. It is interesting to see what the company can do to completely make people stop using ad-blockers because it is definitely a tough problem to solve. While they can ban people using ad-blockers, it will ultimately be a problem for them because people could stop using the platform because of these policies. For now, Google says these reports are “unrelated to its ad blocker detection efforts.”