YouTube’s crackdown on ad blockers has begun to hurt the companies that make them. Several ad blocking companies claim that thousands of people uninstalled their products after YouTube started showing warnings to people trying to watch videos on his website with ad blockers turned on.
One of those companies, AdGuard, told Wired that since October 9, more than 11,000 people have uninstalled its Chrome extension every day, up from a maximum of 6,000 a day before YouTube rolled out the change. On October 18, even 52,000 people uninstalled AdGuard, the company’s CTO Andrey Meshkov told Wired. However, the number of installations of the paid version of AdGuard, which is able to bypass YouTube restrictions, has increased.
Another ad blocking company, Ghostery, said their user numbers were unchanged in October. The company saw a three to five times higher daily number of installs and uninstalls this month alone. The company said that over 90% of its users who completed a survey after uninstalling said they did so because the tool no longer worked with YouTube.
Since YouTube’s restriction most likely only affects people accessing its website through the Chrome browser on laptops and desktops, some users have tried to resolve the situation by installing a different browser. Ghostery told Wired, that installs of their ad blocker in Microsoft’s Edge browser increased by 30% in October compared to September.
Source: www.engadget.com
