Hacker News Reader

Comment by rekabis | Hacker News Reader

…Ads? On YouTube?

_confused look_

I haven’t seen an ad on the Internet in nearly 20 years, ever since the first adblocker got released for Phoenix in 2003 (what became Firebird, then Firefox).

View on HN

I'm sure there are ads you've seen on YouTube, they just look slightly different to what you have in mind.

But first, this comment wouldn't be possible without Deutsche Bahn, the n°1 train provider in Germany. If you go to their website right now with promo code "probably_wrong" you get extra delay on your next trip. If you're going to be late, be late with Deutsche Bahn. Remember: promo code, free delay.

Now, back to our comment. YouTube is full of ads, the only difference being who gets the money from them. Is one of the reasons why some people here don't want to pay for it - you get less ads, but not ad-free.

You can (sort of) block those ads too.

https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock

The answer to this is sponsorblock, which has reached a state where it takes mere minutes, sometimes seconds, for someone to mark the relevant segments in a new video. And it's not just sponsor reads, you can let it skip intros, unrelated tangents, etc.

The best feature of sponsorblock is the "skip to highlight" feature, which skips to the part of the video you actually want to see.

The moment they mention a sponsor I hit right arrow.

i like how electroboom has a screen effect while he's doing the sponsor, so you can see where to skip

very classy, more channels should do this

Marcus House shows a progress bar at the bottom of the screen during sponsored segments, so you always know when to stop skipping.

I'm a big fan of this approach.

Same. I honestly forget it has ads since installing firefox followed by ublock origin are the first two things I do on any computer I'm going to be using extensively. Over the years with different adblockers and browsers, some ads have squeaked through, but on the whole I've lived ad-free on the internet for almost two decades as well.

You're ok knowing YT content creators can't monetize their content when you watch it?

Survival of the fittest, baby. If I like a video, I may donate after I watch it.

Most of the best videos I watch are made by people with some love for the topic and many obviously aren’t making bank.

And yea, for the best I buy merch or patreon or whatever.

Many YT content creators are not allowed to monetize through youtube because of content policies in place. Many more are not allowed because they can't produce the minimum traffic required in the timespan given or level of followers which force clickbait content.

I'm okay removing ads because the quality of video would increase and the type of video would change

If you think about it, people that can't monetize their videos, put much less effort into making good videos. By not paying for content you're actually doing the opposite of encouraging for good quality.

YouTube is mostly consumed on mobile and in their app where adblocking is more difficult.

Brave for both iOS and Android automatically blocks YouTube ads.

On Android you can also use Firefox with Ublock Origin or the NewPipe app which removes the ads. If you want SponsorBlock, there is a fork of NewPipe with SponsorBlock included: https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe/releases

yea sure, we'll all play along with this :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com