YouTube plus an ad-blocker is a fantastic experience. You can watch video after video to your heart’s content, without constant interruptions from loud, occasionally unskippable commercials. But ads are how YouTube makes its money, so they’re not too happy when people use ad-blockers to get avoid them.
Recently, the company has taken a more proactive approach to the situation, showing some ad-blocker users a pop-up suggesting they disable their ad-blocker or subscribe to YouTube Premium. It’s a slow rollout (I haven’t seen the pop-up myself yet while using uBlock Origin), and YouTube is far from the first site to issue such an anti-ad-blocker message, but it’s definitely a first for this free video platform.
How to deal with YouTube’s ad-blocker pop-up
Table of Contents
Hopefully, when you see this pop-up, it’ll only appear as a temporary window, with an (X) you can click to close. However, you may see a warning that blocks you from watching YouTube completely. At this point, the main thing to do is to eliminate the trigger for YouTube’s ad-blocker popup: Disable your ad-blocker.
That’s not excellent news for those of us who like to keep our ad-blockers enabled while browsing the internet. Not only do ad-blockers keep the web focused and clean, they can protect us from malicious ads. Still, YouTube is beginning to get more aggressive about discouraging ad-blockers, and if yours is causing the pop-up to impede your ability to watch YouTube at all, your options are limited. (It even applies to browsers with built-in ad-blocking featureslike Microsoft’s Edge, which might trigger the YouTube pop-up when using the “Strict” tracking prevention setting.)
However, you don’t need to stop using your ad-blocker entirely. Instead, you can whitelist YouTube, telling your ad-blocker to disable itself only while on YouTube’s website, but kick back on for all other sites. You’ll find this option in your ad-blocker’s settings, or it may appear as a quick action. For example, you can click the power button in uBlock Origin to disable the blocker on the current site, then reload to have it take effect.
If you’re willing to spend the money, YouTube Premium is the easiest way to watch YouTube without worrying about ads or the ad-blocker pop-up at all. Of course, that costs $13.99 a month, which is pretty steep for a site whose content would be free otherwise, especially when other streaming services are raising their prices.
You could also try to skirt the browser-based ad-blocker problem by using a third-party YouTube client that delivers content ad-free. If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, the Vinegar YouTube extension blocks ads on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, in addition to offering features like background playback. On Android, you can choose from a multitude of options, including NewTube, SkyTube, and LibreTube, as well as SmartTube for Android TV.
However, if you want to continue using your browser-based ad-blocker on YouTube as you always have, there are some technical tricks you can try. GadgetsToUse has a guide on adding scripts to uBlock Origin as well as the Brave browser, or installing an anti-ad-blocker killer to block this pop-up from appearing in browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Safari.