Why YouTube is fighting a losing game over advertising

Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans
Published in
3 min readNov 5, 2023

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IMAGE: The stupid warning that YouTube produces when it detects an adblocker installed
IMAGE: YouTube

YouTube’s recent offensive against ad blockers has reportedly prompted hundreds of thousands of people to uninstall these browser extensions, despite them being essential in order to enjoy a safe browsing experience (even the FBI recommends using them).

Let’s be clear: if you want to watch YouTube videos without their hugely annoying ads, that’s something you’ll always be able to do, even if you don’t work for NASA. First of all, because despite the warnings and YouTube’s ability to detect that it’s not being able to include ads when it sends you the videos you’ve requested, the company has done absolutely nothing other than put up those warnings. The videos can be viewed with the most popular ad blockers installed. So far, this is simply an “informational” campaign. Simply by using Brave as a browser, I have been able to bypass these pop-ups and watch all YouTube videos with no ads whatsoever.

Secondly, because there are other ways to block ads, such as allowing them to load, but not showing them. Welcome to Fadblock, an extension that uploads an entire video…

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Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans

Professor of Innovation at IE Business School and blogger (in English here and in Spanish at enriquedans.com)