Update October 2024: If you are seeing an anti-adblocking notification from YouTube, please see this article: What to do if you are seeing YouTube's anti-adblocking wall.
If you're seeing a black screen with no video and no message while watching YouTube, you may have run into an issue caused by an intermittently faulty filter in EasyList that occasionally hides the video player instead of the ad. Here are some steps you can take that should correct this issue:
- Refresh the page. If reloading the page doesn't get the video to play, pause AdBlock, reload the page, and when the video starts playing normally, unpause AdBlock. (If you're using Safari and watching in full-screen mode, reload the page, wait 5 to 10 seconds, and then open the video in full-screen.)
- Clear your cache and cookies
- Uninstall and reinstall AdBlock
- Manually update your filter lists
If those steps don't solve the problem, try these more involved steps:
Use a Custom Filter
This solution comes to us from AdBlock fan hexicgrind. His instructions are fairly easy to follow, but do require a willingness to perform some advanced tweaking of AdBlock's settings. We invite you to read his post in our forum.
Check For Extension Conflicts
Ad blockers aren't the only extensions that can cause this issue. It's a good idea to determine whether other extensions might be causing a conflict with the YouTube video player.
- Disable all your extensions, including AdBlock and any other ad blockers you have
- Try to watch your video again
- If it works, re-enable the first extension in the list and test again
- Continue re-enabling each extension, one at a time, testing your video after each, until you find the extension that causes the problem to happen again
- Uninstall it or, if you need it, notify the extension's developer about the problem