Add another reason to the growing pile of reasons why it might be a good idea to shill out $13.99/month to pay for YouTube Premium: if you use the free version of YouTube and have to watch ads before and during some videos, you may have been bedeviled by an annoying bug over the past few months. If you open the official YouTube app on either your Apple or Android mobile device and blow up a video so it takes up your entire screen, you may see persistent ads in the lower corner that don’t go away no matter how many things you try. A lot of people have been reporting them lately, and while there are ways around it, none of them are foolproof.
The problem
As if there weren’t already enough ads
A number of people have posted about this problem on Reddit starting in early March, although there are reports about it going back to May of 2024. Nonetheless, the issue seems to have increased in frequency recently.
Basically, when these users blow up a YouTube video to watch in fullscreen mode on their phones, there will be an annoying rectangular ad in the corner of the screen, usually for third-party apps and websites like Facebook or Instagram. When users click the three dots on the side of the ad in an attempt to dismiss it, nothing happens, no matter how many times they click. Some are unable to access a “Dismiss” command at all. Still other users report the ads going away by themselves in around 30 seconds or a minute. But sometimes, the ads persist.
The unpredictable, scattershot nature of the ads makes it seem like we’re dealing with a bug, rather than some annoying new advertising feature that’s working as intended. And like a lot of bugs, the best solution would be for YouTube to fix things on their end. End users are left with a smattering of options, none of which are wholly satisfactory.
The solutions
Such are they are
If you want to remain in the YouTube app and toughing it out through the ads isn’t an option, there are some things you can try that don’t require downloading anything new. One option is to simply stop watching videos in fullscreen mode, since that’s the only time the bug rears its head. That might work if you mostly play YouTube videos in the background while you do something else, but if you’re actually watching them, there’s no reason you should have to stop doing it in fullscreen mode, so that’s not going to work.
Some users have found success closing the video or closing the app entirely, and then opening it again and playing the same video. But that’s not foolproof either, as some people say the ad comes right back. Finally, some have reported that the ads stop appearing after updating the app in the App Store, but several iOS users reported that the problem persisted even after updating.
If you want to eradicate this bug, your best option is to stop using the official YouTube app. Using an alternate browser like Brave, which does its utmost to let viewers watch YouTube videos with no ads whatsoever, is a solid choice. But some people are uncomfortable with using third-party browsers like Brave, which operates on a blockchain-based ad ecosystem.
Finally, if you’re an Android user, you could use a patcher like Revanced, which modifies the official YouTube app so it doesn’t have ads, but that’s a lot of steps to solve a problem that shouldn’t be there in the first place.
The indignity
Why is YouTube trying to destroy me?
And of course, there’s the option YouTube would prefer you take to fix this issue: pay for YouTube Premium. And YouTube Premium does offer a lot for the money, including ad-free play, background play, and the ability to download videos to watch later. But there’s something vaguely infuriating about the way YouTube has taken a feature like background play, which used to be available to all users, and has now locked it behind the YouTube Premium paywall (Brave also lets people use this function, FYI).
The persistent ads in the corner of fullscreen videos are almost certainly an accidental bug, but given how YouTube has been making the experience of free users worse lately — not only do the ads not always work right, but there are more of them, and the search function feels less useful than it used to — it almost feels targeted. YouTube as a platform should be usable even without paying for it, and for the moment it still is. But with every new feature YouTube strips away or breaks for non-paying users, that becomes a little less true.
I Ditched YouTube Premium—but Lite Just Changed My Mind
I’m sold on YouTube Premium Lite—it’s worth every penny.
The alternatives
There are other video platforms out there, like Dailymotion and Twitch, where people can fulfill their video streaming needs. But YouTube is so dominant — it’s watched more than any other single streaming service, including major players like Netflix — that using them feels a little like a coping mechanism. At least for now, YouTube’s streaming dominance is unchallenged, so it’s in everyone’s best interest that the platform respects its customers, both those who pay and those who sit through ads. YouTube gets paid either way.
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Brave is an open-source web browser focused on privacy, speed, and user control. Its standout features include Shields, which block ads, trackers, cookies, fingerprinting, and more by default, giving users granular privacy protection without the need for extensions.
