That's a pretty good amount to be making. Should easily pay for the time spent maintaining the project.

Yes, it's an issue and there's nothing a pi-hole can do to solve the issue. YouTube is the most notable server of ads from content servers, but one can imagine more content providers following suit eventually.

However, you can have your pi-hole up and running in a few minutes and enjoy excellent network wide ad blocking for virtually every service that isn't YouTube.

I have used a pi-hole based blocker for a while, and I have noticed increasingly ads showing up because they are using same domains, both in-app(iOS) and normal desktop. I've settled for a mix of network wide ad-block via pi-hole and adguard(uses mitm for https blocking) to remove almost all ads. In my experience uBlock Origin has made my aging laptop battery drain a lot quicker.

PS: I'm not sure if I would recommend Adguard, but works fine, but somehow the root certificate keeps me left a little bit dreary about possible future Adguard intentions.

You only need to set it up once per network, instead of once per browser, and it is capable of filtering (most) ads even on closed platforms (e.g. apps on non-rooted phones).

The downside is that it is much less granular and harder to set up exceptions.

Pi-hole will also catch all kinds of tracking and analytics requests that are sent via your mobile devices, non-browser apps, etc. There's a whole lot more of your data leaking out into the world than just the stuff that comes and goes via ad networks.

If you are keen to try out how it works, give https://www.nextdns.io/ a try.

I'm not the maker of the app not can vouch for its integrity but you get a sense of how much network bandwidth ad and tracking takes up on your network.