Users complain about YouTube slowing down: Why is this happening and what to do?

Many users are complaining about YouTube slowing down, 9To5Google reports, citing complaints from people on the Reddit forum. True, this problem is faced mainly by users who use ad blockers. As it turns out, YouTube itself slows down the service when such blockers are detected. And the only solution to this problem is to disable the ad blocker or upgrade to the premium version.

This is the second wave of service slowdown. The first took place at the end of 2023. YouTube's new battle for advertising revenue appears to be affecting significantly more users, at least in the United States.

A 9To5Google correspondent was convinced that when the ad blocker is turned on, the site and player work very slowly: video buffering takes a lot of time, the preview does not work at all, and you have to reload the page to switch to full-screen mode.

“This is mostly due to an artificial timeout written within YouTube’s code to act as a laggy internet connection. While this action taken by YouTube isn’t brand-new, more users are starting to see the tactic in use,” writes 9To5Google.

Earlier, Google announced an increase in the subscription cost for YouTube Premium for users who transitioned from Google Play Music and YouTube Red. The prices will go up in January 2024.

Experts recently estimated that more than 13.3 billion videos have been published on the YouTube video platform. At the same time, most views generate only 4% of these videos, while most of the others go unnoticed.