It's no secret that Google has declared war on ad blockers, and early in the new year, there were more reports of annoying delays for YouTube users who have ad blockers enabled. This time, however, Google's crusade against ad blockers appears to be no worse.

A YouTube spokesperson told Android Central that "recent reports of users experiencing loading delays on YouTube are unrelated to our ad blocker detection efforts." Previously, users had speculated that the problem was caused by an artificial timeout written within YouTube's code.

In fact, uBlock Origin developer Raymond Hill told X (formerly Twitter) that the cause was a recent update to the Adblock and Adblock Plus extensions (version 5.17). adblock and Adblock Plus development teams have since released a fixed version.

Google's previous efforts to block ad blockers included testing of on-screen pop-up messages and a more aggressive three-strikes policy that completely disables the video player after viewing three videos with ad blockers installed. Google tested a similar wave of slowdowns in November when it warned that users "may not experience an optimal viewing experience" when ad blockers are installed.

As discovered by 9to5 Google, Reddit users have reported that YouTube has begun slowing down the entire site when ad blockers are in use. In one thread, several users encountered the same problem, with some mistaking it for a slowdown in Internet speed. Some users using ad blockers reported that previews did not load properly or that they could not access certain features, such as opening videos in full screen or theater mode. It was quickly discovered that disabling the ad blocker being used greatly improved loading times.

The folks at 9to5Google tried this themselves and found that videos took considerably longer than usual to buffer, previews did not load properly, and both fullscreen and theater mode were inaccessible without refreshing the page. We did not succeed in reproducing this problem ourselves, which may mean that this new wave of ad-blocking restrictions is limited to certain regions at this time.

If you are still experiencing this problem, try updating AdBlock or AdBlock Plus to the latest version. Unfortunately, if that does not solve the problem, you only have two options: disable the ad blocker or become a premium member of YouTube. It would not be surprising if this was a deliberate step to try to keep people away from ad blockers. But given Google's reported ad revenue of $224.47 billion in 2022, it stands to reason that it would do everything in its power to nip any threat to that revenue stream in the bud.