General

There are some family plans here that might have openings to join.

My fam watches a lot of youtube so we cough up the money for a family plan. Youtube Music is clumsy but decent bonus so for us it's worth paying.

uBlock Origin

Youtube tells me that I can't, but I just close the popup and keep watching anyways. I use ABP, ad block plus.

After a while they will give you a three-video countdown and then block you.

Are ads on a free service really that annoying?

That's kind of how the space/bandwidth/commissions to content creators/everything else is paid for...

How much does a premium membership cost anyway?

@benstylus Have you tried to watch a youtube video recently without an adblocker? The ads have gotten out of control.

Shadowrunner wrote:

That's one being blocked by YouTube now lol. You have to do workarounds now.

benstylus wrote:
I haven't had ads in years on my desktop but when i do get ads (like my phone or on a tv app) the ads feel about every 10 minutes and most of the time i can't even skip. so its two 15 second ads twice or maybe three times in a row then i get an ad thats around 2 minutes that i can skip and the cycle repeats.

Not to mention the "Hey I'd like to take this time to thank today's sponsor" ads.

Also, I have a YT channel that is not monetized, yet they play ads on my videos? Say what?

Archer wrote:

I have, and I disagree. I typically get a non-skippable 5 or 15 second ad or a skippable 15 second or longer ad at the front of the video.
If the first is unskippable, sometimes a second ad right after that which is always either a 5 second add or a skippable one.

Typically that's all I get until the end of a video if it's under ten minutes. If the video goes longer than that (to about 25-30 minutes) there is usually one ad popping in somewhere towards the middle. Maybe two.

There are certain channels that have tons and tons of ads, but I have always assumed they were channel specific and the creators on those channels are actively bumping up the ad breaks to get more monetization.

benstylus wrote:

I guess it does depend on what you are watching. But non small channel, non niche videos are getting out of hand. Ad breaks every 5 minutes. Only able to skip once per video. They've added in 2 minute ads now as well. I once saw a 5 minute ad, but thankfully it was skippable. They are now on the level of basic TV commercials. I'm almost certain is to try and drive up premium subscriber numbers.

I've been shifting to using invidious. I like the simpler interface.

bill wrote:

Do they filter all ads, or just some. I tried using a similar service earlier in the year, but they showed their own ads instead of the youtube ads. So I stopped using it.

EDIT: never mind, I see. Its not a site but a program. I see its setup on many different sites. I may set this up myself on my linux desktop.

bill wrote:

Good mention, I am now using this after checking it out.

I just picked one of the invidious hosts. I think a drawback may be that the host could stop working and we'd have to switch to another host. It seems a little slower too.

I also thought about making my own, but I'm trying not to do that sort of thing (maintaining such things is a drag long term).

I would pay for youtube, but I don't actually use it that much (in my opinion <~15min/day?), so the subscription cost is just way too high. If they did a low-use $5/mo sub, I'd likely do that.

p.s. I think sites should use the gtz sub pricing model. $20/year is reasonable for no ads.

Looks like AdBlock has updated and now works with YT. Takes a few seconds for the video to load, but I can now watch videos on my computer!

Youtube is now trying to do full on video sized pop-ups over the video in an inlayed layer (an iframe) that loads separate from the page and is layered over the video. To try and and trick you and adblockers into clicking on it to play it first. ABP doesn't seem to have updated yet for me to fix this. But what is funny is you can see the ad before you start playing the video because its clearly not the video you clicked on showing. And if you just wait 15 seconds it goes away. And then no more ads. Because of how they have to code it to show, its timed and therefore vanishes after the timer even if it wasn't started/played. Its so stupid. Its like the late 90s early 2000s internet all over again.

So I figured you know what, I bet an old school Anti-Banner would see this and block it. And sure enough it does. So now I'm running an adblocker and an anti-banner/pop-up plugin in my browser.

benstylus wrote:

When they're a minute long and unskippable, or 30 minutes long? You bet they are.

I left the room one time and came back to a (skippable) ad that had a runtime of over an hour.