YouTube’s latest error message is really an ad-blocker crackdown — blocking playback unless you go Premium or disable the extension

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.

To make things worse, several users claimed that Google was intentionally slowing down YouTube videos for users with ad-blockers installed on their devices, with some indicating that they'd received a countdown video asking them to disable their ad-blockers or get blocked from watching YouTube videos.

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.

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.

YouTube not opening for anyone on mobile? from r/youtube

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...

Will YouTube’s ad-block crackdown push you to go Premium? Share your thoughts in the comments and cast your vote!

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