YouTube hurts the companies that make it. Several ad blocking companies say thousands of people are uninstalling their products after YouTube began showing warnings to people trying to watch videos on its website with ad blockers enabled.
One company, AdGuard, said More than 11,000 people have uninstalled the Chrome extension every day since October 9, compared to 6,000 uninstalls per day before YouTube implemented the change. On October 18, 52,000 people uninstalled AdGuard, said the company’s CTO Andrei Meshkov. Wired. However, installations of the paid version of AdGuard rose, which YouTube’s crackdown did not affect.
Another ad blocking company, Ghostery, said its usage was flat in October, seeing three to five times the daily number of installs as well as uninstalls. Notably, the company said that more than 90 percent of its users who completed a survey on why they uninstalled the product said they did so because the tool no longer worked with YouTube.
Since YouTube’s crackdown only seems to affect people who access its website through Chrome on laptops and desktops, some users have also tried using other browsers as a workaround. Gostrey said Wired Microsoft Edge browser installations rose 30 percent in October compared to September.
YouTube ads are More to Google’s total revenue. The company has sold more than $22 billion in ads on the platform from the beginning of this year through September. But the streaming platform is also trying to get more people to pay for YouTube Premium, which gets rid of ads, lets people download videos, stream videos in higher quality, and access YouTube Music. Earlier this year, the company raised YouTube Premium prices by $2 to $14 per month.
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