YouTube's latest weapon against ad blockers spoils the ending

YouTube has been waging a war against the use of ad blockers for some time now and its latest trick is its cleverest yet.

Some YouTube users, determined to avoid commercial interruptions – which are very annoying but generate revenue for both the service provider and the people creating the videos that everyone can watch – have noticed that videos now jump up to the end when a reading attempt was made.

According to some people on Reddit (via 9to5Google), only turning off their ad blocker causes video performance to resume as expected. Some people said that if they managed to get around the jump, the sound would cut out completely.

This may be some sort of problem with the ad blocker itself. The ad blocker may also inadvertently cause issues when interacting with YouTube. However, judging by recent form, it seems very likely that this is another ploy by YouTube to discourage the use of this revenue-draining technology.

YouTube, of course, offers users the option to remove ads by paying for YouTube Premium, which is expensive but includes access to the YouTube Music service. However, this would mean that ad broadcasters also have to pay for music.

Naturally, Reddit is full of people who are harmed by Google's audacity in interfering with their inalienable rights to free content on the Internet and anything else that might pay for that free content.

“I hate YouTube so much. Greedy company,” writes _k1llswitch. “The ads are sometimes ridiculous and I will NEVER pay a cent for your stupid premium service. I don't use YouTube on my phone so it's not a problem and I guess I just have to wait until the people at AdBlock find a way to make it work again.

The apparent skipping issue comes after Google began warning that people with ad blockers enabled would be unable to watch videos. Then playback would slow down and, in some cases, unduly overload the computer's memory and cause a slowdown in the performance of the machine itself.

It's a battle that YouTube is likely to continue to fight, we think, as ad blockers and users continue to insist on finding new workarounds.