Ad-blocker users face new YouTube restrictions disguised as error messages.
Over the past few years, YouTube has seemingly turned into a magician with a few tricks up its sleeve designed to bolster its aggressive campaign against ad blockers.
Last year, multiple reports emerged claiming that Google was preventing playback on YouTube videos for users with ad-blockers installed on their devices. “Ad blockers violate YouTube’s terms of service,” added Google.
And as it now seems, Google and YouTube's campaign against ad blockers isn't going to stop any time soon. As reported by TechSpot, multiple users have lodged complaints about a sudden increase in "This content isn't available, try again later" errors on YouTube.
Perhaps more concerningly, the outlet claims that there's more to the story than meets the eye. The errors seem to be the latest attempt by Google to deter users from using ad blockers when interacting with and watching YouTube videos.
(Image credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)
Building upon this premise, multiple Google Chrome and Firefox users indicated that they were unable to get videos to load on YouTube until they disabled ad blockers installed in their browsers or upgraded to YouTube's $14/month Premium subscription plan.
Interestingly, YouTube responded to a user affected by the issue and asked them to clear cache and cookies. The company also suggested logging out and signing as a potential workaround for the issue (via Windows Report).
However, the user indicated that the issue persisted even after using the workarounds offered by YouTube.
Some users found that selecting “Learn More” on the error page and then pressing the browser’s back button could restore YouTube video playback. Others suggested spamming refresh requests till the YouTube video finally load.
To that end, YouTube's "This content isn't available, try again later" error message seems to be more intentional than a simple outage. Ad blockers will need to ship updates with better filter rules once developers identify the modified request patterns. It now seems like a cat and mouse game with no clear winner in the horizon...
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