 Over the past few months, YouTube has been experimenting with ways to stop people from watching videos on their site or really use their site at all if you have an ad blocker enabled. You might have seen this message pop up if you were trying to use YouTube with ad blockers or if you haven't seen this yourself in your browser, you've probably seen it posted to somebody else's social media because they've gotten it and really at this point, this pop-up on YouTube has kind of become a viral meme. Now, like I said, this all started on YouTube as an experiment for them to just test out how people would react, would they actually disable their ad blockers? But I think now it's been pushed out to YouTube's production servers because pretty much everyone that's using ad blockers on YouTube or at least everyone who's using certain ad blockers at certain times before they're able to update their filters to combat whatever new technique YouTube is using to detect them have actually seen this message, either this one or this other one that says they're able to watch three videos until the video player is going to be blocked unless they disable their ad blocker. But this has really been backfiring against YouTube in some of the worst ways possible because it's made the people who were using really crappy ad blockers that didn't even really work on YouTube in the first place switch to better ones or even premium ad blockers in some case, where people are actually paying money to the ad blocker developer to use it. And of course, because this new change to YouTube's platform is so controversial, it's made a lot of mainstream news headlines that the normies have seen it now. And so now they're finding out about ad blockers where they weren't even thinking about it. Or like I said, they're now finding out what the good ad blockers are instead of them just using whatever the first one was that popped up in the Chrome extension store. It's kind of like when the police or some other crime stopper has a PSA in your neighborhood and they say, oh, don't go to that apartment complex over there. There's a bunch of bad guys that are selling drugs and it's so strong. It's already killed three junkies last week. And the next thing you know, they've got a line down the block outside of their trap house. I know that we talk about some more advanced tech stuff on this channel, usually, but you've got to remember that the vast majority of people out there just use the defaults in their software. OK, they buy a laptop from Walmart that's got Windows 11 installed on it. And then they use Microsoft Edge or, you know, maybe they use Google Chrome. But most people are used to having ad blockers in their lock screen and in their start menu. OK, they don't even realize that you can block these ads and that you can block ads in your browser and do lots of other stuff with browser extensions because they didn't even know that browser extensions were a thing. And really, I think that's the most beautiful part of all this kind of the silver lining to YouTube trying to block people using ad blockers is that it's pushing some people at least to learn more about their browsers and to learn more about their extensions because from what I've seen, you know, people are actually OK with watching ads, at least a certain amount of ads. You know, the internet pretty much reached a consensus on that years ago where all the most popular software, even if you go back a couple of decades, it was all stuff that was free with a little bit of advertising. And then eventually that moved into targeted advertising, where the owners of these platforms would go through all your data and your metadata and then even sell that to other people like data from your Gmail account or data from your YouTube habits in order to do targeted advertising. You know, recommend products to you even better than what your friends or people have known you for 10 plus years would be able to do because of how much they've been spying on you and how much they know about you. But when it gets to the point where you keep cramming more and more ads down people's throats and you've got these unskippable ads and ads that are longer and longer, eventually people are going to resort to using ad blockers or just ad block browsers that come with it built in. You would think that internet companies would have learned from the Streisand effect where if you try to stop people from doing a thing and Barbara Streisand's case, it was stop people from posting pictures of her house on the early 2000s internet that it backfires and everyone ends up installing an ad blocker and also having pictures of your house on their MySpace page or whatever. And really, this has been happening long before the internet, you know, long before the Streisand effect with respect to trying to block something or ban something and then accidentally making it more powerful. Like when you look at drug prohibitions, specifically with cannabis prohibition 50 plus years ago, the most powerful weed, at least according to my 60 plus year old hippie friend was tie sticks, which were maybe 10 percent THC at best. But that's basically ditch week by today's standards. Or hell, if you go back a hundred plus years to prohibition, right? Here in America, liquor was not that popular prior to prohibition. Most people were drinking beer and wine and cider and stuff like that. But, you know, when any amount of alcohol becomes illegal, you might as well go and get some cask strength whiskey or 151 rum because there's more party per milliliter in those bottles. And I think the same thing is going on here with ad blockers. Like I said, some people are actually spending money on things like ad guard premium and putting money directly in the pockets of these ad block developers. Other extensions like you block origin. They're probably getting more donations from people and there's more testing that's going on, more bug reporting. And since it's open source software, there's probably more people contributing to actually improving that particular ad blocker because that's how strong people's hatred for YouTube and for all the ads that are in YouTube has become. And for the record, I don't actually mind people blocking ads on my YouTube videos. I'm not like some content creators who are going to compare it to piracy and then compare that to theft while at the same time auctioning off prototypes that were supposed to be sent back to their creators. I really don't care if you block ads on my videos. That's honestly part of the reason why I created my website based on when to sell merch. And I've also been looking into ways that I can create more premium content that I can actually justify selling without just running ads on the stuff, because honestly, the whole free with ads model that the Internet was built on, I think it's dying. OK, the only reason that I think YouTube would even get this extreme with blocking ad blockers in the first place is if they're desperate for money. If they're desperate to actually start turning this platform into something that's profitable, but making these radical changes to the platform to block the ad blockers, I think it's going to just make the platform die more quickly, especially if it ends up breaking functionality for people that are using it legitimately, especially on things like embedded devices, TVs and such. Like my step parents just bought a Chromecast and they're thinking of buying YouTube premium and canceling their Direct TV subscription. But if my stepdad goes to turn on his Chromecast one day and he can't watch Fox News or whatever, he's just going to switch back to watching Direct TV and watching five minute plus ads. So yeah, it's it's a really, really bad idea that I think is going to end up backfiring and ultimately causing this ship that is YouTube to sink faster. But comment below, do you think that YouTube fighting ad blockers, the way that they have been and trying to cram 13 plus ads into videos is actually going to cause the platform's demise to come faster? Or do you think they're actually going to manage to become profitable after braiding people enough and they finally turn off their ad blockers? Let me know in the comments below and also like and share this video to hack the algorithm and check out my merch on based.win where you can automatically save 10 percent at checkout when paying with Monero XMR. Have a great day.