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The move is aimed at increasing subscriber volume for the platform’s paid service, YouTube Premium.
YouTube, the online video sharing platform owned by Google, has decided to extend ad-blocking to third-party apps. The move is aimed at increasing subscriber volume for the platform’s paid service, YouTube Premium.
The use of third-party ad-blocker apps would now lead to buffering problems when a viewer tries to watch a video, YouTube has informed, or the error message: “The following content is not available on this app.”
YouTube Premium, the service that offers an ad-free viewing experience, can be obtained for a cost of Rs 129 a month per head. YouTube also has a monthly Student Plan at Rs 79 while a Family Plan, at Rs 189, can be availed by five persons.
“We want to emphasize that our terms don’t allow third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership, and Ads on YouTube help support creators and let billions of people around the world use the streaming service,” a community statement issued by the video sharing site said.
“We only allow third-party apps to use our API when they follow our API Services Terms of Service, and when we find an app that violates these terms, we will take appropriate action to protect our platform, creators, and viewers,” YouTube added.
Last October, YouTube embarked on global action to curb ad-blockers by blocking their video-playing facility. Such users were told to disable ad-blockers if they wished to continue watching videos seamlessly on the site. The global action on the part of YouTube came as an aftermath of the site’s advertising revenues seeing a downslide by 2.6 per cent, to $6.69 billion in the first quarter of 2023. This was the third consecutive quarterly slump that the video sharing platform recorded.
Revenues have seen an upward surge since then, and in February this year YouTube recorded over 100 million paid subscribers across its various platforms including YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. This was a 20 million jump in the number of subscribers since November 2022.
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