Personalized advertising is a powerful propaganda tool. For users, it can improve the relevance of the ads, thus increasing the user click rate; for advertisers, it can improve the return on investment; and this kind of ads often needs to be based on the user’s access to data to achieve the targeting and display to the user with their more relevant advertising content.
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Simply put, some websites use trackers to collect information about a user’s browsing, which can be used to improve their service and deliver personalized ads to the user, among other things. However, there are also some trackers that also send the collected information to another website.
In response to this problem, major browsers such as Microsoft Edge offer three tracking protection modes: basic, balanced (default), and strict, with the strict mode blocking most trackers from all sites, making it difficult to personalize many ads, which also leads to the possibility that some sites may not be accessible properly.
A large number of users have reported that Google is blocking them from watching YouTube videos if Microsoft Edge has “Strict” tracking protection mode enabled.
As early as May 2023, there were reports that Google had been testing an anti-ad-blocking experimental feature for YouTube, when it detects that some users are using an ad-blocking program, it will pop-up window to remind the user unless the user disables the ad-blocker or subscribes to YouTube Premium, or else they will not be able to access the site. This user, for example, was alerted by a pop-up that the video player would terminate after 3 videos.
Google has actually been fighting ad blockers for a long time, briefly banning them from the Play Store in early 2016, for example, but reverting back to its original strategy shortly afterwards. But clearly, it didn’t stop there.
More and more YouTube users are starting to see this warning and pop-up as Google gradually strengthens its anti-anti-tracker features, and this time it’s even directly confronting the browser’s optional tracking protection mode.
As we can see from the Google Alert, Google maintains that “ad blockers violate YouTube’s Terms of Service”:
- You may have activated an ad blocker. You must either allow YouTube or turn off the ad blocker to continue playing the video.
- Ads allow users around the world to access YouTube.
- For an ad-free experience, users can opt for YouTube Premium, which ensures that content creators are still paid.
Therefore, users have only two options: allow YouTube ads or purchase a YouTube Premium subscription. But the good thing is that this issue doesn’t affect all users, which suggests that Google is still in grey-scale testing and will hopefully tweak it later.
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