Recently YouTube has initiated a ‘war’ on adblockers. People probably wouldn’t mind a few ads but YouTube ads are now far worse and far more intrusive than the ads on TV (which I also never watch but that’s a different topic). Don’t let them do this to you. Make them pay.
This should work with any browser that uses extensions. If you don’t know what browser extensions are go look that up before reading the rest of this. If I go into every little detail this post is going to be very long and probably very confusing.
- Add the uBlock Origin extension to your browser.
- Once it’s there, click on the icon in the toolbar at the top of the browser window.
- If you don’t see the icon, figure out how to pin that icon to your toolbar. Different browsers do this differently so you’ll have to figure that one out for yourself.
- Click on the icon.
- Click on the three little gears on the right side of the control panel that pops up when you click the icon.
- Go to the “Filter lists” tab and click on that.
- Click “Purge all caches” and wait for that to finish.
- Click “Update now” and wait for that to finish.
- Close and reopen your browser. You have to start with a fresh browser load for this to work. If you don’t, it won’t work until the next time you open your browser.
- Enjoy an Ad Free Youtube 🙂
- If ads start showing up on YouTube again, repeat steps 4-8
uBlock Origin is an open source software that is constantly being updated to combat intrusive ads including those on YouTube. If you get ads again in a day or two at the most the software developers will have updated their filters to block them again.
There’s a lot of controversy and a whole pile of mistaken ideas about YouTube. Yes, YouTube is dastardly. THIS IS HOW YOU FIGHT BACK!
YouTube makes its money from ad revenues. By blocking ads you deny them that source of income. Not only that, you actually cost them money when you use YouTube. Boycotts for this sort of thing are completely ineffective. They don’t care if you don’t use their site, odds are good that if you’re a Conservative you’re not very welcome there anyway. YouTube/Google/Alphabet Corporation have literally billions of users. It’s not going to make even a tiny bit of difference to them if you and me and every other Conservative in America boycotts them. NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL AND YOU BOYCOTTING YOUTUBE IS HELPING YOUTUBE.
Costing them money rather than making them money is a whole ‘nother critter. They still get the page landing credits in their server logs, that can’t be helped. That’s what they use to convince advertisers that the fees they charge for running ads is worth it. If you do what I’m saying those page landing credits become suspect or even worthless. That’s minor but real even so.
The big thing is that they have to pay for server infrastructure, bandwidth and labor to serve content on the internet. By denying them revenue in blocking all their ads you are making them pay without any offsetting revenue.
I’ve seen people say they don’t want to “participate in the problem” in supporting YouTube by watching content on YouTube’s website. This is ineffectual and useless except to make such people feel smug about how righteous they are in not using YouTube. It has zero actual effect on YouTube. If you want to strike a blow instead of just feeling smug about yourself, make YouTube spend money on you for no return.
I’ve seen people call YouTube “BeastTube” and other silly things like that. Yes they’re dastardly but no I’m not impressed with a clever, or often not-so-clever nickname. If you really want to hurt YouTube for being dastardly then fight back, don’t just run away and think you’re accomplishing something. You’re not.
10 replies on “How to block ads on YouTube”
I have ublock origin (had not known/forgotten about the filter/cache thing so thanks for that) and Ghostery and so far they have worked well.
Most of the content on Youtube I watch have hosts that often enough have sponsored videos where the host plugs product or service himself and usually are entertaining while doing so.
Guilt free support feels good.
The filter/cache thing is important because as YouTube comes up with various means of detecting ad blockers, the developers of uBlock Origin come up with countermeasures and that’s how you update those.
I’ve never used Ghostery but it gets good ratings so it’s probably as good as anything I use. If something is working for you and you’re happy with it there’s no reason to change anything.
I don’t mind the ad reads by the hosts so much. Sometimes I skip them anyway just because. Some of them are pretty long and once they tell you about the product more dialog without providing more information is just being inconsiderate.
Don’t feel guilty either way. That page landing count I mentioned in my post drives the traffic algorithm up. Even if you’re skipping all the ads on your favorite Conservative commentator’s content you’re still raising their hit count which makes them show up higher on the suggestions lists. You’re bringing more people to their site thereby. Which means some of those people will let the ads run and the content provider will do better revenue-wise than they would have without you watching their content. You can’t help but help the content provider when you click on their video and watch it at least 50% of the way through.
A click load is good as far as the provider is concerned and dropping a comment is also helpful but if you don’t watch the video past the 50% mark it does little to advance their content. This is why if you mistakenly hit a click-bait title you should stop the video and get out of there ASAP. Don’t encourage the click-baiters to click bait.
Yeah I am lucky that the sponsored videos do not have a terribly long ad read, though the few that still do Raid Shadow Legends ads tend to get a little louder.
I haven’t followed anyone on youtube yet so they are not getting that extra bump and have no one to share the videos with but I do watch some more than once and figure that gives them enough boost, especially watching some that are 3-4 years old to give their back catalog a boost in the algorithm. One of the hosts did a little “how we make money” video once and pointed out that if you wanted to make money on youtube, don’t expect the cash to come rolling in right away, but once you’ve built a catalog, as people are searching for things and watch something you did a while back, the more stuff you have the more you can make. Of course if you have good content and someone goes on a 4 hour binge of your channel, that’s good too.
Ghostery might be most like your page blocking addon, and I find it most useful for its finer grained controls. I can tell it to block twitter or discus everywhere but then allow them on certain sites where they are most necessary (well discus maybe, not so much twitter) although since I have 3 separate firefox profiles to keep things separate, I can allow twitter on twitchy’s site on one of them.
It’s going to be an arms race, adblockers vs. Youtube and who will eventually win in unclear, but if Youtube wins we can all rest assured that they won’t be the last place to clamp down on adblockers, others will follow suit, so we have to keep making it more and more painful for Youtube and others to engage in such invasive tactics, that’s the only way to prevent this kind of behavior, to hit them where it hurts the most, i.e. make them lose revenue.
All true.
They’re making the same mistake that free OTA (Over The Air) TV made. Rather than keep the ad runs low and charge more for the ads they bumped up the frequency and duration of ad runs to increase revenue. Which eventually self bloated to the point of making things unwatchable. When I was a kid ads on TV ran for 5 minutes at the top and 3 at the bottom of the hour with thirty seconds to a minute and a half on the quarter hour.
Look at any older TV show that has a run time of 55 minutes and compare that to newer shows that have a run time of ~40 minutes for the proof of what I’m saying.
The bloat eventually took up a third or even more of any given hour of air time. Sometimes significantly more. That’s a lot of cumulative hours of people’s lives to waste on trying to sell them something they may or may not be interested in.
When cable TV first came out there were virtually no ads in that content either. You paid for your cable subscription and that was the revenue source so ads were not needed to fund the content. You bought a cable subscription for two reasons; a large selection of guaranteed technically high quality video without the OTA transmission/reception issues and no commercials.
Then when technology matured countermeasures were implemented. Of course they were. Those networks and broadcasters were stealing the hours of people’s lives without giving them good value in return. “Good value” here defined as more time spent on content and less time spent on ads. More of what people wanted and less of what they did not. There are only so many minutes in anyone’s life. Those minutes have a LOT of value and if they’re going to be exchanged for something that something needs to be of equal value or greater. Stealing them a few at a time is insidious not a ‘reasonable business model’.
Those providers were abusing their market and the market fought back as soon as it became possible. So …
You could use something like a TIVO box to time shift through the ads and that was very popular. As soon as I found out such a thing was possible I built my own box so I didn’t have the expenses and restrictions imposed by TIVO. But TIVO was on the right course.
It also soon became possible to record (or in digital versions make a copy of) a show, run software against the recording/copy that detects the commercials, cuts them out and then stitches the video back together without them and saves an ad free copy.
I used to do that just to get a TV show or movie that kept it’s continuity without interruption. I figured I could either spend my time sitting through all those ads or modifying the video to remove them and … The way I see it I’ll be the one to choose what to do with my time not some television advertising exec. When it became possible to automate the process I did it on everything I wanted to watch. Now there are even better alternatives but I’m not going to get into them here on this site because not all of them are more than quasi-legal.
I can’t say I haven’t suffered through a commercial in decades though of course that’s the goal. I can say that in the last couple decades I have watched close enough to none to be an insignificant difference.
YouTube appears to be making the same mistake in providing good value that other media sources have made in the past. This is nothing but unchecked avarice.
OK, well I can be avaristic about the minutes of my life too and screw ’em. When they insist on stealing my time from me any implied contract we may have had is null and void. You can’t legalize theft of portions of people’s lives no matter how you want to rationalize that.
The funny thing, as in absurd not as in humorous, is that there is a very tiny minority of people with both the desire and skill to fight back against that unbounded greed. Most viewers just let the ads run, it’s only a very small percentage of us that know something can be done about that and do it.
So in their unmitigated rapacity YouTube is spending huge sums to try to block anti-ad countermeasures that are only used by an insignificant percentage of users anyway. Which proves this is greed because to gain a few pennies they spend many dollars on this. Rather than that it would be more economically advantageous to detect the blocking of ads and write off the expenses incurred thereby.
Good job, YouTube et. al. If you succeed you won’t get revenue from me anyway. I’ll just stop using your platform and read more books. Someday these bastards are going to figure out how to put ad in books too. There’s a good lesson that they do not seem to have learned about killing and eating the goose that lays the golden eggs. If you want my golden eggs you’re going to have to give me good value for them.
I use Adblock Plus and it works great on Firefox; I’ve used it for years. My problem is that there is no reliable ad blocker for my Android TV box. Youtube is infuriating with their idiotic ads, and it gets MUCH worse in election years, as you surely know! If anyone knows of a good ad blocker for Android boxes please post it here.
Danke.
Troy
I use an app called “SmartTube”, in the beta release, on my android devices and Fire Sticks … Which are basically android devices too come to think about it. That does a pretty good job of filtering out YouTube ads. I don’t know if it’s on Google Play, wouldn’t surprise me if it’s not considering Google owns YouTube. If not you can do what I do, which is get the APK and sideload it.
It does a pretty good job of filtering out the crap on YouTube. It’s a sort of a YouTube wrapper that taps into YouTube so you don’t add an ad blocker, it is the ad blocker and it’s the YouTube player too. You launch SmartTube to watch YouTube content. This is probably the best and maybe the only way to filter YouTube ads on other-than-desktop environments. Because it is the player and not YouTube it can do whatever needs to be done without YouTube messing with the content.
This is the same concept as a linked video like here on this site. You never see a YouTube ad if you watch a linked video here. Ad reads by the content provider are a different matter but the SmartTube beta does a surprisingly good job of skipping those too.
You can learn more and get the APK here if it’s not on the app store …
https://smarttube.app/
It’s on the Amazon app store if you use Fire TV stuff. I do because I run my own media server and plugging in Fire Sticks and loading that server app (I use Emby, not Plex, if anyone is curious why just ask), is the easiest way to allow access to my family and a couple friends. It’ll work for anything an Emby app can be loaded on. Fire Sticks are cheap and reliable. You can pick up a 4K Fire Stick for ~$29 or less and they have a great picture and up to Atmos audio. They also update regularly so I never have a codec problem. Which is saying something in this world of ever evolving multitudinous codecs.
I use Adblock Plus and Adblock Pro on my main browsers, which are a hardened FireFox and Google Chrome. I also run NoScript and uBlock Origin as well as an extension called “Block Site” on them. Block Site gives me the capacity to just block a site if it’s a threat or a problem. All this in combination gives me a very fine degree of control over what runs in a browser and is probably a little beyond the skill, or desire, of an average user.
I just watch YouTube in the Brave browser – haven’t had an ad in years interrupt my vids
On a desktop computer or on something else?
Brave browser uses the Chromium kernel/engine like Microsoft Edge does. It’s just a rebranded version of Google Chromium (not the same as Chrome but not all that different either) with a built in ad blocker. Nothing wrong with going that route if you want to.
So … What I posted above doesn’t apply to you.
Brave is kinda buggy in its adblocker, or at least that’s what people complain about. There’s also the problem it has with breaking websites. It’s an OK but not great browser and its ad blocking is not as robust or reliable as uBlock Origin.
Again, whatever works for you and you’re satisfied with, then that’s all good and what I posted doesn’t apply to you.
For everyone else and anyone who doesn’t want to set up and experiment with an unfamiliar browser — The instructions I posted above should come in handy.
All of that said, anything you do that denies YouTube income is a check in the plus column. You’re not quitting, you’re fighting back and that’s what counts.
Interesting. Aside from the occasional web page that doesn’t work on Brave (non ad blocking related), I’ve had zero problems in terms of as blocking functionality.
Regardless, you’re doing a public service and we’re offering useful info from two different directions.
And you still need to guest post at Flopping Aces!
(Yes, I’m going to keep being a pain in the a** trying to recruit you!)