This is a rather disturbing move to me, as I am a YouTube addict and adblocker user. I use NextDNS, a DNS-based service that's like your own PiHole in the cloud.
It is sometimes tricky for me to disable adblocking! There are a couple of approaches. Resetting my DNS servers to defaults is disruptive and error-prone; it's a non-starter. I find it peculiar that there is no knob on NextDNS that says "disable blocking features and act like normal DNS" even though they themselves enable such a feature if you run out of free monthly queries. You can disable a bunch of features one-by-one, but of course that affects all sites, not just the one. You can whitelist any domain you want, but that involves a cycle of testing and guessing which ones are emanating from the site you want to use.
In short, there's no straightforward way of just telling NextDNS "don't block ads while I'm on YouTube.com" and it's for that reason that I sort of miss uBlock Origin. However, YouTube does use native domains for all its ad serving, and I see them all now anyway, so I don't believe that this new policy will adversely affect my usage profile.
If I had to pay for all of the web platforms I use (on top of paying for internet access to begin with) on a daily basis I would have no disposable income. And I'm not ready to live in a world with even more micro micro-transactions. I don't think the world is economically capable of supporting the web the way big tech companies wish to be supported if they couldn't continue just selling our harvested data alone.
I suppose the point is that if someone is a self described addict of a particular service, it's not entirely unreasonable to expect them to pay for that service (directly via premium, or indirectly via ads).
I did this. I was skeptical at first but it's such a big qol improvement. I got a family plan so now that's what I bring to the streaming service exchange with the family and they love me for it
I was kind of against it since it seemed like a waste to pay for spotify and youtube music, but its honestly worth it just for ad free youtube alone. Only video streaming service I pay for.
How does it work? Youtube for a long time now has been serving video ads from the same domain names as videos so you can not block video ads on DNS level.
As far as I know, the only way to block ads is by using ad blocker in a browser, or modified or 3rd party Youtube app.
It is sometimes tricky for me to disable adblocking! There are a couple of approaches. Resetting my DNS servers to defaults is disruptive and error-prone; it's a non-starter. I find it peculiar that there is no knob on NextDNS that says "disable blocking features and act like normal DNS" even though they themselves enable such a feature if you run out of free monthly queries. You can disable a bunch of features one-by-one, but of course that affects all sites, not just the one. You can whitelist any domain you want, but that involves a cycle of testing and guessing which ones are emanating from the site you want to use.
In short, there's no straightforward way of just telling NextDNS "don't block ads while I'm on YouTube.com" and it's for that reason that I sort of miss uBlock Origin. However, YouTube does use native domains for all its ad serving, and I see them all now anyway, so I don't believe that this new policy will adversely affect my usage profile.