Well, it seems to be official now. Starting April 14, 2025 Google will update its Unfair advantage policy to say it is allowed to show the same ad, from the same company, going to the same page, as long as the ad is in a different ad location. Google was just experimenting with double serving ads earlier and now it is officially going to be allowed.
Watched something on YouTube on my TV for the first time last week. Never again. 12 minute video had like 6 or 8 ads, 2-3 were 30 seconds. Fuck. That.
SmartTube
I love SmartTube. Every time someone comes over and they want to play something via YouTube, they’re like: “holy fuck, no ads? skipping straight to music part? this is divine technology”
Right! Why is an adblocker such a foreign concept to the bulk of humanity.
SmartTube is the best. There was a small period of time recently where it stopped working and it was so bad going back to regular YT that I just stopped watching entirely.
Just checked, sounds like that program isn’t working anymore.
I can’t find it on my Roku or AppleTV or TIZEN or WebOS.
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be designed to work without an account.
I think I remember being able to switch to anonymous user with it.
Yeah, normal YouTube is totally unwatchable. If you have a Roku device, the Playlet app can let you watch without ads. There are probably methods for other devices too.
Roku is terrible too though. Their data collection is bad and they’ve started tightening their grip on some things.
Sure, after you’ve waded through the swamp of Roku ads, you could get an adfree youtube experience with that
I dunno, all I see on Roku is an image banner on the home screen. I never even look at it.
Yeah, it’s not worth it. Maybe sometime I’ll get something like pihole set up so YouTube is usable on my TV, but for now, I just plug in a laptop w/ proper ad block.
I’d totally pay for YT if it was reasonable for my usage. But I honestly watch so little that their monthly sub just isn’t worth it for me.
I have a pihole and the youtube app on a smart TV. Trying to block the ad domains from the TV just bricks the app. Maybe I’m doing something wrong but, I got no luck.
You can’t block youtube ads with DNS blocking; youtube serves ads from the same domains it serves the actual video from.
You need a custom youtube client like Revanced.
Yeah I figured they went the Twitch approach. Desktop YouTube I still have ublock for, but there’s no hope for the TV.
I’d pay for it if their first-party experience wasn’t so horrific and gave me any control over my feed.
I pay for it so the TV and web experience is ad free. I use PipePipe on my phone because the native client won’t stop pushing shorts at you.
Yeah, I mean, you don’t need to pay for it to get that.