YouTube ads are annoying and invasive. Between ruining the experience of watching your videos to YouTube (Google) tracking your habits to “personalize” your ad experience and sell that information to third parties, it’s frustrating. And with YouTube adding even more ads, thanks to AI, the ad mess will persist. Luckily, there are ways to watch YouTube ad-free without purchasing a Premium subscription.
1.) uBlock Origin
Created in 2014 by Raymond Hill, uBlock Origin is a free, open source ad blocker that blocks "ads, trackers, coin miners, popups, annoying anti-blockers, malware sites, etc." It's available for Firefox and Chromium browsers, but it works best for Firefox-based browsers, especially after Google switched to the Manifest V3 protocol. Simply add the extension through the Firefox add-ons or Chrome web store, and you are all set. Web browsers such as LibreWolf and Mullvad Browser come with uBlock Origin by default, so there is no need to manually add it.
The DuckDuckGo browser, a partially open source Chromium browser, has a great feature called the Duck Player. When you play YouTube videos, you will get a prompt that asks you if you would like to view it in the Duck Player. With the Duck Player, it brings you to a new page that just contains the video and allows you to avoid seeing ads and YouTube providing you recommended videos from your browsing history. It provides you a more clean and private way to watch videos without ads or tracking. You can enable this option by default in Settings→Duck Player→Always open YouTube videos in Duck Player. DuckDuckGo browser is available for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.
Note: With the Duck Player, you will not be able to see comments or live chats; you will need to watch the video or stream through YouTube if you wish to see them.
3.) Brave browser
Brave is a free and open source Chromium browser that has its own built-in ad blocker, so it easily blocks YouTube ads as well as other ads on webpages. Brave is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android.
💡Privacy Tip: Have I Been Pwned? (haveibeenpwned.com) is a website that tracks data breaches and allows you to search your email address and passwords to see if you were caught in one. Since data breaches are happening almost every day, having this resource is crucial.
4.) Firefox Focus
Firefox Focus is a free and open source browser that is only available for mobile and tablets. Focus is a browser that you mainly use for a quick search and destroy once you're finished, as it does not have an option for multi-tabs. The browser has a built-in ad blocker that works well to stop YouTube ads (and many ads on webpages), and it blocks a wide range of trackers too.
5.) FreeTube
FreeTube is a free and open source YouTube client that is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. FreeTube blocks ads and prevents Google from tracking you as you watch your videos. You can even subscribe to YouTube channels without an account. With FreeTube, you can change the settings to personalize the player, such as hiding recommended videos, live chats, and comments. If you like to support the project, you make a donation via Bitcoin.
Beware: Some of these methods might give you issues. Google has started to make changes to YouTube and its API in an attempt to make it difficult to watch ad-free videos without Premium. For example, sometimes videos will not play in the Duck Player or in FreeTube. I noticed that, if you have a VPN enabled and change the location, sometimes it will go through and other times it will not, so keep that in mind.
What’s your experience with blocking YouTube ads? Let me know in the comments.
Until Next Time,
Monique 💻
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Additional link for further reading:
I use Brave browser on desktop and CleanTube on smartphone.
Thanks for sharing these tips, Monique! I have been using DuckDuckGo for search for several years now. This convinced me to install their browser. I don't watch much YouTube, but Duck Player is where I will do it from now on. Thank you :)