“Hundreds of thousands” of deletions: YouTube users refuse to use ad blockers

YouTube users have begun to actively remove ad blockers, reports 9to5Google.

They are taking this action because the popular video hosting service has stepped up its fight against ad blocking on its platform. YouTube has been carefully introducing these measures for months.

For example, in the summer, it became known that YouTube was conducting a “small global experiment” by warning users to disable ad blocking to avoid video viewing restrictions.

But recently, the company has stepped up its efforts in this direction and eventually started blocking video viewing with ad blockers. Apparently, this “convinced” some users.

The Wired reported “hundreds of thousands” of uninstalls, not of YouTube, but of ad blockers. However, this also led to a record number of new installations, as many people tried to switch from one blocker to another.

Ghostery, an ad-blocking company, has confirmed this trend. It conducted a survey among users who uninstall ad blockers. 90% of them stated that they did so because of changes on YouTube.

AdGuard said that the number of daily uninstallations was growing throughout October. Recently, the number of removals reached 52 thousand in just one day.