For anyone watching YouTube without an ad blocker or Premium membership, the number of ads it serves has come to the point where it is like American public broadcast TV channels. Up until recently, I was using a loophole where one could sign up to YouTube Premium in a country where it costs under €4 Euro per month through the use of a VPN. However, Google cracked down on it and sure enough they cancelled the subscription on my account saying that they don't believe the country I signed up in to be accurate.
As I mainly watch YouTube on a PC, the next best workaround I found is to use the browser Brave just for YouTube, which has a built-in ad blocker. While I could just install an ad blocker on my main Firefox browser, personally I don't find the ads bothersome on the vast majority of websites, unlike YouTube where they clearly went overkill. Some websites really put up a fuss when they detect an ad blocker, such as CellMapper. I didn't realise just how bad the ads got on YouTube over the past few years until I tried watching a few videos and found myself just wanting to leave the site rather than watch through/skip so many ads!
For curiosity, to find out just how intensive the ads got on YouTube, I opened up the Chrome web browser, started playback of a random video with auto-play enabled and left my PC screen recording for a 2 hour period. When I returned, I went through the recording noting the time stamps of each individual ad and whether it showed the 'Skip' button after 5 seconds into the ad. I put these details into a spreadsheet to get the accumulative number of ads, ad time (5 seconds for skippable ads) and video time:
In the 2 hour recording, YouTube played just over 40 minutes of ads! As most people skip ads that are skippable, the last column shows the accumulate ad time where skippable ads are counted as 5 seconds, which would have reduced the total ad time down to about 4.5 minutes.
If we look at the accumulative video time column, we can see that by the time YouTube played 1 hour of actual video content, it served 23 ads, which consisted of 10 double ads and 3 single ads. Two pairs of doubles were effectively 4 in a row due to a double ad being played at the end of one video followed by a double ad at the start of the next video. 7 of the ads could not be skipped. No wonder so many people are turning to ad blockers and unofficial ad blocking YouTube apps.
I recently started using Spotify to listen to music, so was curious to see how it compares for ads without a subscription. The Spotify Desktop app turned out to be surprisingly tame, playing just 2 ads in the hour I left it playing music while reading a magazine. Just to rule out a fluke, I played it another hour and it did not play a single ad. The Spotify App on my Android based phone however is more ad intensive and played 8 ads during 1 hour of playback, which consisted of 2 double ads and 4 single ads. Unlike YouTube, Spotify's ads cannot be skipped and last about 30 seconds each.
As I mainly watch YouTube on a PC, the next best workaround I found is to use the browser Brave just for YouTube, which has a built-in ad blocker. While I could just install an ad blocker on my main Firefox browser, personally I don't find the ads bothersome on the vast majority of websites, unlike YouTube where they clearly went overkill. Some websites really put up a fuss when they detect an ad blocker, such as CellMapper. I didn't realise just how bad the ads got on YouTube over the past few years until I tried watching a few videos and found myself just wanting to leave the site rather than watch through/skip so many ads!
For curiosity, to find out just how intensive the ads got on YouTube, I opened up the Chrome web browser, started playback of a random video with auto-play enabled and left my PC screen recording for a 2 hour period. When I returned, I went through the recording noting the time stamps of each individual ad and whether it showed the 'Skip' button after 5 seconds into the ad. I put these details into a spreadsheet to get the accumulative number of ads, ad time (5 seconds for skippable ads) and video time:
In the 2 hour recording, YouTube played just over 40 minutes of ads! As most people skip ads that are skippable, the last column shows the accumulate ad time where skippable ads are counted as 5 seconds, which would have reduced the total ad time down to about 4.5 minutes.
If we look at the accumulative video time column, we can see that by the time YouTube played 1 hour of actual video content, it served 23 ads, which consisted of 10 double ads and 3 single ads. Two pairs of doubles were effectively 4 in a row due to a double ad being played at the end of one video followed by a double ad at the start of the next video. 7 of the ads could not be skipped. No wonder so many people are turning to ad blockers and unofficial ad blocking YouTube apps.
I recently started using Spotify to listen to music, so was curious to see how it compares for ads without a subscription. The Spotify Desktop app turned out to be surprisingly tame, playing just 2 ads in the hour I left it playing music while reading a magazine. Just to rule out a fluke, I played it another hour and it did not play a single ad. The Spotify App on my Android based phone however is more ad intensive and played 8 ads during 1 hour of playback, which consisted of 2 double ads and 4 single ads. Unlike YouTube, Spotify's ads cannot be skipped and last about 30 seconds each.
