The rampant use of ad blockers has got publishers worried and companies that are in the business of serving ads are also quite concerned. Yahoo appears to have dealt the first blow in this fight against ad blockers, several reports indicate that the company is locking out some users from their email accounts if they are using ad blockers. It’s only when they turn it off that they can access their email accounts again.
This came to light when a thread was spotted on the official Adblock Plus forums, many users had complained that they couldn’t access Yahoo Mail on Chrome and Firefox. Screenshots were also posted of the message these users were seeing, it said “disable Ad Blocker to continue using” the service.
The change hasn’t been made on a major scale as yet. A spokesperson for Yahoo tells Engadget that the company continues to develop and test new product experiences, further explaining that “this is a test we’re running for a small number of Yahoo Mail users in the US.”
It’s unclear if Yahoo has any intentions of making this the norm from now on, that users who have Ad Block enabled will not be allowed to access their email accounts until they rectify the situation. It remains to be seen if other companies like Google, which also relies on revenues from its ads business, will take any similar steps.