I block YouTube ads on all my devices by paying for YouTube Premium. It feels refreshing to be able to pay for a service I enjoy and therefore not be served ads which I don’t enjoy. It seems like a win-win to me. Doing something like this, while technically interestingly, seems like far more trouble than it’s worth for 99.99% of people, especially when there’s a reasonably priced way to block ads that also supports the service.
I paid for a family subscription a couple of years ago. It is very reasonably priced. Probably one of the least regretted subscriptions I have given the amount of use I get out of it
I’ve been paying for premium, basically because they’ve been sort of forcing to people with the ridiculous number of ads. I get zero ads injected. You’ll still get sponsorships that are part of the video done by the creator, which is now become a little bit more annoying. But at least it’s something that the content creator completely approves of and endorses. I can skip that part anyway.
I’ll probably cancel it soon, only because I need to stop watching so much of this stuff, and I need to get rid of things in life that I shouldn’t be paying for. Once I do that, I’ll never be able to watch YouTube again, because it was unbearable with the number of ads injected. I hate being reminded over and over that I am nothing but a consumer that they try to influence with ads over, amd over, and over, and over.
Off-topic, I recently got another free month of Amazon prime. I was watching some shows on there, and the ads are f’n annoying there too. I can’t believe they make people pay more now to remove the ads. I’ll never pay for Prime in any fashion.
I have paid for YouTube Premium for years and watch YouTube nearly every day and I have never seen an ad from YouTube (you still may see baked-in ads from the video creator but those can be automatically skipped with the SponsorBlock extension).
I do it this way, pay for premium and still use an ad blocker. I do it this way because there is no question whether or not I see ads. My conscience is clear because YouTube claims creators get a kickback when premium users watch their content.
For me it’s the best middle ground. I pay one bill, everyone gets paid.
One day my YT Premium subscription stopped playback when I was watching something while cooking and at the same time, some music video was playing on a different device. It said something like "you cannot use your premium account in multiple places".
I went back to my PC and immediately cancelled my subscription. That is a restriction that I don't have when I am not paying anything at all.
This blocking method also wouldn’t touch those. I’m comparing apples to apples. If you want to block ads inserted directly by video creators, you need something like SponsorBlock and to either DIY or rely on someone else to have done it before you.
That would be all nice and dandy, except that by doing that you validate all the things that Google did before to kill off any competition in the video hosting space.
There were plenty of platforms out there that could not rely on Google's bottomless coffers to sustain their operation. Were you paying for those as well?
I get that, but in that case it also makes sense to avoid YouTube altogether since you simply being there continues to deprive other services of the opportunity to compete. These days I think YouTube’s biggest competition is stuff like TikTok, which I find odious.
I totally get that the network effect makes it difficult to leave abusive platforms, but if one cares enough, it is possible to make that sacrifice. I deleted my Facebook account, for example, and now I can’t keep up with numerous people and groups that use Facebook. It was worth the sacrifice for me.
I put all the ad blockers on YouTube and I pay Nebula not because I particularly enjoy it (it's nice, but not the first thing I think about when I want to watching some videos) but because I want to signal content creators "hey, if you want to be supported by your audience but worry that YouTube is the only place where you can make a living out of it, there is an alternative."
