YouTube is clamping down on ad blockers, forcing users to choose: Suffer through intrusive, TV-style commercials or pony up for YouTube Premium. Either way, it’s another blow to the promise of a cord-cutting future where the internet delivers endless free content.

Since its debut in April 2005, YouTube has grown into the second-most-visited website on earth. Its 2.5 billion users upload 300 hours of video every minute. It’s the top mobile website of its kind in America, according to Nielsen, with 7.1 million monthly users.

Entertainment hasn’t seen such dominance since the “Texaco Star Theatre,” starring Milton Berle. During its run in the early days of TV, between 1948 and 1956, Nielsen found that the program was showing on up to 97 percent of TVs.

Yet, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” as bars began saying in the 1930s, when they began offering snacks to tempt customers. YouTube introduced ads ranging from 30 seconds to two minutes in January 2009, with occasional options to skip after a few seconds.

Today, with 30 million visitors daily, ads are YouTube’s main source of revenue, totaling $29.2 billion last year. The money funds content creators. According to ZipRecruiter, as of last week the average YouTuber earns around $66,000 a year.

Even as ad blockers became popular, YouTube could afford to look the other way, satisfied with exponential growth that squeezed out competitors. The strategy was akin to the hole in the fence that children used to sneak into New Jersey’s Palisades Amusement Park.

Poised on the cliffs overlooking Manhattan, the Park thrived between 1898 and 1971. Its owners were told about the illegal entrance but didn’t repair it, believing that children who enjoyed cheating the cost of a ticket would visit more often.

In June, YouTube at last began closing the hole in its digital fence. First, its smartphone app disabled ad blockers. Viewing through iPhone’s Safari and browsers on computers remains free of commercials for most users, though some are now choked.

Content creators have also taken to inserting traditional live reads and rolling commercials by sponsors, which ad blockers are powerless to detect. For the era of commercial-free streaming, the writing is on the screen.

This week, users accessing the service were greeted by a prompt saying, “Ad Blockers Violate YouTube’s Terms of Service.” They must now choose to allow ads or subscribe to YouTube Premium, which costs $13.99 a month and $139.99 a year or $22.99 a month for up to five family members.

The student discount of $7.99 a month is an acknowledgment that Google, which purchased YouTube in 2006, projects that half of viewers younger than 32 won’t be subscribing to a pay-TV service by next year. Accustomed to freebies, young people need coaxing to pay for play.

“We’ve launched a global effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube,” Google said in a statement, “or try YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience. Ads support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube.”

Google linked to a support page in the statement that said if users “continue to use ad blockers, we may block your video playback.” Viewers have few alternatives. While feasting at YouTube for years, they have starved the alternatives.

YouTube earned 400 times the revenue of its upstart competitor, Rumble, in the fourth quarter of 2022. Facing this disparity, Rumble has yet to declare war on ad blockers. Leaving its hole in the fence open may help it gain market share but will exact a price.

Addressing the change, the popular AdBlockPlus extension wrote on its website that its “teams are working hard to figure out what we can do to continue offering a superior user experience” to prevent YouTube ads that “distract from the content you actually want to watch.” 

In this cat-and-mouse game, YouTube has the upper hand. Expect users to be left with no choice but to endure ads or pay to enjoy content and to learn that despite promises of cost-free entertainment, whether in the Jazz or Digital Age, a free lunch comes at a cost.