And now Google’s web video monopoly is going to show ads even when you’re not watching and the video is paused.
“We estimate we can sell up to 80 percent of an individual’s visual field before inducing seizures,” said the fictional CEO (of a company that bears more than a passing resemblance to Google) in Ready Player One.
Apropos of nothing, it’s possible to block every single ad on YouTube — even the sponsorships that are baked into the videos themselves — on both desktop and mobile.
The nice thing about FreeTube and Invidious is that they don’t use the YouTube API and the most YouTube can do (at the moment) is issue takedown requests. You can just self-host invidious (which I believe FreeTube uses). The code is unlikely to be taken down as YouTube-dl has successfully fought off those takedown requests.