YouTube ads have gotten way out of control in recent years, which is why so many users are frustrated with the platform’s decision to crack down on ad blockers in recent months. Now, one developer has come up with a really clever workaround that speeds up YouTube ads instead of blocking them.
The crackdown on ad blockers has been quite effective to say the least, even leading to a lot of folks switching between browsers and even uninstalling their ad blockers to keep watching YouTube. And, largely, that’s because Google’s methods of detecting and in turn blocking an active ad blocker has been hard to bypass. While some paid ad blockers seem to work, the vast majority of tools don’t seem to do the trick.
That’s why this new extension is so clever.
“Ad Speedup” on the Chrome Web Store (also compatible with Edge) does exactly what the name implies. Instead of blocking ads from appearing at all, it just plays them at an incredibly fast speed to minimize their interruption of your content. The extension automatically recognizes an ad that is playing and speeds it up by 16x. That turns a 30-second ad into just a second or two. The extension further mutes the ad by default and, in a future release, will also automatically hit the “Skip” button.
Another extension that was posted to Hacker News a few days prior to “Ad Speedup” already supports hitting the skip button, but only speeds ads up by 10x. “Ad Accelerator” is also available on the Chrome Web Store.
In a quick demo of “Ad Speedup” posted to Reddit, as seen below, it really does drastically speed up the ads.
The extension works really simply by leveraging the playback speed controls of YouTube. While ads can’t be sped up through YouTube’s player by default, this extension uses the browser’s video player to speed up playback when an ad is detected as our Dylan Roussel notes. It’s remarkably simple, and that’s part of what makes it so clever.
How this affects creator payouts, though, remains to be seen, as watch time certainly has an impact on advertising rates. YouTube Premium is still by far the best way to ensure the creators you are watching still get paid for their work without you having to deal with ads, but this extension at least seems a bit better in this regard compared to an ad blocker.
Dylan Roussel contributed to this article.
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