I canceled my YouTube Premium subscription recently. We were paying $23 a month for the family plan and I thought it would be worthwhile, as an experiment, to see how things would be without it.
The extra $23 in my pocket each month will be a welcome change. Not that it’s a particularly expensive subscription, but it does add up over time. That $23 each month is $276 a year, which is nothing to scoff at — just ask your favorite compound interest advocate.
Having ads on YouTube is not a great experience, though. Obviously. But I have a plan for how I’m going to eliminate ads without a YouTube Premium subscription.
On iOS, the solution is actually quite simple. Rather than using the native YouTube app, just open the YouTube website in Brave. Brave’s built-in ad blocker will prevent ads from loading on the platform. The same method works in Brave on desktop as well.
Lucky for me, Brave is already my default browser on both platforms. So I don’t need to do anything differently on desktop and it’s just a matter of using Brave for YouTube on my iPhone instead of the YouTube app.
The much trickier platform is Apple TV. Unlike iOS and desktop, there’s no web browser to fall back on. Instead, I’m using a nifty little VPN trick. You see, YouTube doesn’t display ads in some countries — you can connect to a VPN and route your traffic through Albania to prevent ads from loading on YouTube.
I have the ProtonVPN app installed on all of our Apple TVs and we just connect to Albania before using YouTube and then disconnect the VPN when we’re done.
In addition to my primary methods for watching YouTube on each platform, I also have a handful of other options at my disposal.
I have an Invidious instance setup on my Umbrel. It’s a front end for YouTube that strips a lot of the annoying features and eliminates ads. This is what I use for tracking newly published videos on my favorite YouTube channels.
The reason Invidious isn’t my primary method for watching YouTube, though, is that YouTube often makes changes that breaks Invidious’ functionality. So there are occasional times where it just doesn’t work at all.
I can also use Parabolic on my Framework, which I use for downloading one-off videos for playback later.
On our Mac Mini home server, I’m running MediaHuman YouTube Downloader. The app is setup to automatically download new videos from a small set of channels. The videos are added to folders that Plex is indexing, so shortly after they are uploaded to YouTube, the videos are visible in our Plex library.
Lastly I have iSH Shell on my iPhone with yt-dlp installed through pip. It’s painfully slow to use compared to other options and makes my iPhone a bit toasty during use, but it’s useful in a pinch when I want to download a video.
As an additional benefit to making this change, I’m hoping the extra work required to watch YouTube without ads will introduce just a little bit of friction, ultimately reducing the amount of time I spend on the platform. I’m not obsessed with YouTube or anything, but it has become a bit of a crutch for me whenever I’m looking for a cure to boredom. It would be better if I spent that time doing, at least slightly, more productive tasks.
