I got fed up with this shit and invested a bit of time into getting a working Premium Family plan through a cheap country (Ukraine is about $4 per month). I invited my whole family (parents included) so essentially 6 people have an ad-free YouTube now for less than $1 each (per month). I assume that’s still less than what they have gotten by serving us a shit ton of ads. And I am rid of that cat and mouse game for a while.
As others said: VPN. Ukraine seems to work good currently, since the Credit Card address isn’t validated. Cheaper countries like India or Turkey now check if the CC you use is from that country. That is a bit more complicated to pull off, so that wasn’t worth it for me.
For the service they offer (the hosting basically) I am actually willing to pay quite a bit. But what they typically ask for (about €15 for a single account) that’s just not worth it, given that YouTube isn’t the producer of the content they serve. Music might be a bit more complicated thanks to the fucking idiotic way how licensing around that works. Anyway: nothing of that excuses the excessive use of ads they serve nowadays.
If you consider YouTube as garbage, then it would be a no-brainer to just stop using it, instead of complaining about ads, right? And no, I couldn’t care less. I use YT maybe twice per year. It could go offline tomorros, as far as I am concerned.
Yeah yt-dlp has been my strat this whole time anyway. Also Piped and Invidious get the job done when i’m too lazy to type in one short command for every video I watch.
Also, specifying format with yt-dlp is unnecessary (“-f 22”) if you have ffmpeg installed iirc because it automatically selects the highest quality, thus shortening the command even further.
Higher resolution videos actually have better bitrates on youtube. Like if you select 4k even if your monitor is just 1080p, the video will look much better.
All the more reason just to use yt-dlp. I know it takes a tiny bit of time to set up, but it’s well worth it. I’m able to download 20-minute videos that would have otherwise buffered in less than a minute. I can simultaneously queue up a bunch of videos, and watch them with zero stuttering.
You can also put “alias y=yt-dlp” in your ~/.bashrc to minimize it to “y”. Or set up a keyboard shortcut to a script that executes the command with your clipboard content.
Or do the same with “mpv” instead of “yt-dlp” to watch the video stream directly without downloading.
The entire internet nowadays is either monopolized or close to it. I miss the days of many servers hosting indie websites, as opposed to one or two companies per niche.
Google is keeping their services free for long enough, so people start believing it’s supposed to be like that. At the same moment they keep paying for their music streaming, cloud storage and the rest…
It’s not free. They take your data while alsp giving you ads. A quick Google suggests they have about 280 billion in annual revenue. Which part of that is free?
This data is translated into money through the ads, and people are trying to block it aggressively. Which part of that is not free?
280 it’s not from YouTube, but the entire corp, right?
Also revenue is not the profit. The cost for maintaining video streaming is enormous, especially if this size. Only traffic itself can easily eat half of YouTube’s revenue.
PS Don’t get me wrong, I think Google is a typical corp with no feelings. But I’m surprised how people not complain about Spotify, Tidal, DropBox, etc…
It’s pretty random whether you get the message or not. Some of my friends, including me, straight up cannot watch youtube on their website half of the time anymore, because it full blocks us. It’s not just an annoying message, videos actually just don’t play. But I only get it on some days. I think the message only pops up if you’ve been watching for more than like an hour straight. Then again, some of my friends have never seen the message. Who knows. Just more weird big tech server bullshit. Like how twitter’s api works 15% of the time (for me).
Purge cache and refresh does the trick if you have problems with the firefox+ublock combination. Or you have some other active extensions which prevents ublock from doing its thing.
Been watching for 3h straight and still no pop or problem with videos but when time eventually come I’ll try to setup UBO filter or using 3rd party frontend
I’m daily using uBlock Origin (with Firefox) on Windows, and ReVanced on Android, and have experienced zero indications that Google is at war with ad blockers. These two are fucking fantastic and highly recommended. I don’t expect it to last forever, but bravo to these devs and contributors.
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