Youtube ads finally got me

ublock origin is still one step ahead of them (at least on firefox) but you may need to go into the extension settings and purge then update all your filter lists. The copy of Invidious I installed on my NAS is even more steps ahead.

NewPipe doesn't show ads.

Permanently Deleted

ReVanced for youtube. This links to a Lemmy post of how to install. It also has a FAQ page if interested

Ok, if I remember correctly, YouTube barely generates, but generates nonetheless revenue for Google. There are many ways to make more money without fucking over its users by cutting costs:

• downgrade old videos with small watch count to 720p30

• make people pay for hosting >1080p60 content

• do not allow private/unlisted videos

• straight up remove 10h looped videos - they take so much space, but are technically spam - both for bandwidth and storage

And my go-to solution: focus on sponsorships as main source of revenue. They are the only ads I can tolerate and are actually effective from my experience. YouTube can just take a cut from every sponsorship on YouTube video and everyone will be happy.

The old business model could not last forever… and even if it could it was not good for anyone.

Think about it

Hosting videos is expensive, someone has to pay for it. It was mostly paid by ads. Ads which many (most people) would block and many people would not ever click even when not blocked. But it still made money… The money come only from ads which 1) where not blocked 2) where at least clicked. The business relied on that.

So YT relied on ads targeting people who did not know how to block ads and people easy to manipulate by the ads (eager to buy whatever they are trying to sell). Probably not the brightest. Or just easy to be taken advantage of. So the incentive would be to promote content for those people. Not good content, not true content, just content that makes ads viewed and clicked.

People using ad-blocks were still affected by those who do not. And whole site was optimized for advertises not viewers or content creators. And that is bad.

I am all in favour of any direct form of payments instead of ads powering the internet. Sites get very little money for each view anyway – so the prices for users should also be quite small.

Unfortunately as long as ads are supposed to be normal part of internet, they may get forced even onto paying customers. We need regulations.

Update your ad blocker, you only get that when it's out of date

Libretube. Get v0.19 or higher, youtube just screwed around with its code and broke v0.18. I love how it works with sponsor block to even skip those "this video is brought to you by xyz incorporated, be sure to Yada Yada Yada..." segments.

I don't understand this. And not saying it to stir up hate, or troll. This came up for me, I closed the pop-up, and watched the video with no ads. It only added a single click to the whole thing. And they've since gone away for me. Don't know why they stopped, though they have.

Use Piped.

I moved to YouTube premium a few years ago, family subscription, to share with up to 5 people. YouTube is my main source of entertainment and the 15 bucks total (or whatever the conversion rate is) is less than 90 minutes of a movie in a cinema, nit even including transportation and snacks. I get my news, tech news/reviews, tutorials, documentaries, inspiration and laughs on there. I watch it while getting ready in the morning, on my lunch break and for a longer while in the evening. I share it with 2 other people so it works out to around 5 bucks a month. And the creators I like get a big portion of that.

Sure, around 60 bucks a year might sound a lot, but it's the only service I pay for (except the 2 bucks a month Disney plus trial until December). As a small bonus YouTube music transformed my Google home devices into a multi-room audio Sonos alternative for under 1/3 of the price.

I still use NewPipe on my phone for downloads for offline use and yt-dlp for content I want to hoard.

Revanced

Actual unpopular opinion: get yt premium. It gives creators the money they would've got for you watching an ad, while giving you an ad free experience, and also includes yt music which might take some adjustments if you're used to Spotify, but then you will also not be supporting Spotify which is probably the worst streaming service in terms of paying artists.

(They're all bad and many people would argue similarly against supporting Google via YouTube, so perhaps it's a moot point, but that's part of how I justify my sub to myself anyways.)

If you are visiting YT on mobile, ReVanced has been working perfectly for me on Android. I'm not sure if there is cross-platform support, but there are alternatives to traditional adblockers out there.

I still haven’t encountered this. Use FF with updated uBO filter lists and you should be fine.

Maybe peertube? Its a decentralized and federated video plataform

Lazy answer: Invidious. I often use inv.tux.pizza, but there are a few dozen public instances.

Nobody is leaving YouTube. There's no viable alternative right now because of how expensive hosting video is.

Just sign out and remove all the youtube cookies and the adblockers still work just fine. Sign in when you want to comment or use another browser that is signed in and never watch the video on that browser. Simple solution. Another option is watch the video by right clicking and opening in a "new private window" instead of watching while signed in. That works really well until you want to comment.

Although I still watch YouTube videos (using Freetube on desktop, Newpipe on mobile), I recently joined Nebula.tv + curiosity stream.

uYou+ on iOS (installed from GitHub using Sideloadly or AltStore) is working great, even skips sponsored segments and allows background playback

AdNauseum Firefox

Newpipe

I'm self-hosting a Piped server, and it's working great. I was able to import my YT subs from a Google Takeout dump, and I continue to add more channel subs on the Piped server. So far, no YouTube ads, plus it uses SponsorBlock, so I can skip that content too.

For mobile client, LibreTube is working quite well for me. It talks to my Piped instance, so subs (but not watched history, unfortunately) are maintained on the server. I'm still looking for a Piped client for Chromecast GTV to complete the ensemble for me. Right now, I still use my YouTube account with SmartTube Next (which also avoids YT ads and uses SponsorBlock).

https://newpipe.net/

I don't understand why people are just taking it for granted that everyone's watching youtube.

I've watched maybe a video a month on youtube for the last decade. It's a noisy loud messy platform and I don't understand what people enjoy about it.

I watch Netflix a bit and at least the shows there are actual produced shows and not just some bullshit some teenager made up in their spare time. Even if a lot of them are still trash there's a much higher signal:noise ratio than on youtube.

So my solution is: just don't use youtube? And obviously use an ad blocker or piped.video if you do occasionally visit it.

Unpopular opinion - The ads aren't that long and content creators deserve to get paid.

I know that doesn't answer your question but I don't think a few seconds of ads is worth leaving a platform over.

Have you considered paying them? Premium comes with music as well as the extra features in app.

Use Brave instead of chrome or Firefox or whatever. As of last night it was still good.

I didn't go anywhere. I spend a lot of time on YouTube and enjoy the service immensely. Also, YouTube Music is my main streaming source. And yeah, I pay for both, every month. It's worth it to me. YMMV.