YouTube Not Working? It Is Probably Your Ad Blocker

Many people are experiencing problems with YouTube showing an error message instead of the video. Usually this is caused by an ad blocker browser extension.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Have you been having trouble viewing videos on YouTube on your Mac. Well, it could be your ad blocker.
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I've been getting a lot of people asking me about this and I've seen people posting all over the place about this particular problem. You go to YouTube and you go to view a video. Instead of the video you get this big black rectangle. If you click on it you'll see an error message that usually looks something like this. So sometimes this happens with some videos at YouTube and sometimes this happens all the time in YouTube. So what's going on here?
Well, one of the things that can cause this and that's causing a problem for a lot of people right now is simply having an ad blocker. You can see here I've got an ad blocker installed. You can see the symbol for it here in the Tool Bar and if I go to Safari Preferences and I go to Extensions you can see I've got an ad blocker here. Let's disable the ad blocker. I'll uncheck it here. There are actually two components to it. With that unchecked I'll reload the page. Now you can see it works fine. The video plays. 
Now what makes this tricky to diagnose is sometimes everything could work find for awhile. You could install an ad blocker and YouTube videos play fine. Then it's only later on that they stop working. So people aren't always connecting installing the ad blocker to YouTube videos not working. But anytime anything goes wrong in a web browser the first place you should look is your extensions. See what extensions you've got. Try disabling them and see if that fixes the problem.
When you're using an ad blocker you're looking at a modified version of a webpage. See the thing is that ad blockers are far from perfect. They don't really know how to block the ads at a website. They've go to look at the code on the website, determine what parts are ads and what parts aren't and block the ads. Sometimes that breaks webpages. Sometimes they block the wrong part. Often there are going to be errors like this. 
Now I hate ads. As a matter of fact MacMost.com is an ad free site. So is the MacMost Newsletter. Instead I've got a Patreon Campaign. So MacMost is a rare website on the internet that doesn't have any ads. But a lot of creators, a lot of individual creators like myself, either at YouTube or with their own websites rely on advertising to pay their bills. So I hate ads. But I also hate ad blockers and I don't use them. If I website has so many ads that the annoyance of the ads outweighs the value of the information at the site I simply stop going to the site. Usually there's another place to get similar information. Otherwise I'm okay with tolerating a few ads here and there.
As a matter of fact I like how YouTube does it. Most ads can be skipped after 5 seconds if you're not interested in the ad. Plus they even offer YouTube Premium which allows you to pay a little bit money and then not have any ads at all. I like it when websites give you a choice like that.

Comments: 3 Responses to “YouTube Not Working? It Is Probably Your Ad Blocker”

Peter Emery

3 years ago

I determined this myself about five days ago, getting rid of Ad Block & all its associated files fixed my issue.

Bill

Funny thing is if you have a problem with that in Safari just use Brave ( which blocks all ads) and it works just fine.

Gary Rosenzweig

Bill: But if everyone uses ad-free browsers or ad blockers, the content you like will soon disappear.

Comments Closed.

YouTube Not Working? It Is Probably Your Ad Blocker

Comments: 3 Responses to “YouTube Not Working? It Is Probably Your Ad Blocker”

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