YouTube's server-side ads resulted in a black screen for ad blocker users

About a month ago, we reported that YouTube has begun testing server-side ads. Now, users are reporting that they are running into a black screen when they tried to watch videos.

YouTube has been cracking down on ad blockers rather aggressively since last year, in a bid to get users to switch to YouTube Premium, which starts at $13.99 for a month's subscription.

Brief recap on YouTube's war against ad blockers

The streaming service allegedly began delaying the videos, creating an artificial lag on browsers other than Chrome and Edge. But, reports indicated that the problem affected users who had an ad blocker installed.

The Mountain View company had revealed in April this year, that it was displaying an anti-ad block prompt for users who were blocking ads, and encouraged them to subscribe to its Premium subscription. But ad blockers came to the rescue once again, allowing users to bypass the nag screen. Less than a month later, it appeared that Google stepped up its efforts by causing videos to skip automatically if it detected an ad blocker, but it turned out to be a bug related to Adblock Plus. Firefox users have accused YouTube of deliberately offering an inferior experience on non-Chromium browsers, but it has never been proven definitively.

Anyway, Google wasn't done with its shenanigans. YouTube decided to inject server-side ads into the videos, i.e. unlike ads that run separately, these new ads are embedded directly into the video stream, and are tricky to block, but it was not an impossible task for the good-old ad blockers.

Seeing a black screen on YouTube? It's not just you.

Mashable reports that users ran into a black screen on YouTube, and that it stayed for about 6 seconds before the video began playing. The reports indicate it affected several browsers including Firefox, Edge, Vivaldi.

Some users joked that they would rather see a black screen than an ad. While that's certainly a better experience, it does waste precious seconds of our time. A simple workaround for the black screen on YouTube is to just refresh the page, hit F5 as soon as the page starts loading. uBlock Origin's filters were updated with a patch to resolve the problem, the add-on updates its filters automatically. If you are still experiencing the black screen issue, just open the extension's dashboard and manually update the filters. This tug-of-war is getting annoying, but it appears to me that Google's efforts are actively promoting the use of ad blockers, instead of attracting new subscribers.

I did not run into the issue in Firefox, but that's mostly because I don't use it for YouTube anymore. However, I can confirm that FreeTube had a similar issue at about the same time. Videos were failing to load when using LocalAPI. This bug was quickly fixed in an update, and I think it is possible that the two problems could have been related to each other. And for those of you who are experiencing the auto-scrolling window issue in FreeTube, here's a workaround for the annoying bug.

On a side note, Google Chrome users may notice a warning that says "These extensions may soon no longer be supported". You can learn more about it by reading Martin's article.

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