YouTube is great—except for the annoying, unskippable ads. And after the introduction of YouTube Premium, it seems like the number of unskippable ads for free accounts keeps going up. If you don’t want to sit through three ads just so you can watch your video, it might be time to try a different approach.
There are several great third-party YouTube apps and tools that will give you a great ad-free YouTube experience—and they’ll do it for free.
YouTube Premium and Premium Lite
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first. YouTube Premium is the best and only way to remove all ads from YouTube videos on all the platforms that you use (including smart TVs). No other tool will offer that.
But it does come at a cost, and that cost keeps rising. As of writing, you can snag a subscription for $15.99 per month. If your household would all benefit from a subscription, you could consider a YouTube Premium Family plan for $26.99 a month, which lets six users share the same ad-free experience. But, like Netflix, YouTube Premium also deters password sharing, and it only works if all the members live at the same residential address as the account manager.
YouTube also has a cheaper $7.99 per month plan now in the form of YouTube Premium Lite, which promises an ad-free viewing experience for most non-music YouTube videos.
You can also try subscribing to YouTube Premium from a country where the rates are low. In countries like Argentina, India, and Turkey, YouTube Premium costs less than $2 per month. Install a VPN, change the location, and try your luck subscribing to the cheaper plans.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is quickly becoming the anti-AI browser. Unlike Chrome, the privacy-focused browser lets you choose exactly how many AI features show up in DuckDuckGo Search and the browser (there's an option to disable all AI features as well).
Now, the company has integrated a YouTube ad blocker directly into the browser on the desktop and on mobile apps….