Disable, Block or Remove YouTube Ads
One of the most annoying
issue with YouTube is the ‘sudden’ popup AdSense ads that appear while the
video is playing. But there is no official procedure to disable, block or
remove AdSense ads from YouTube videos, unless they are your own YouTube
videos, because this is the only way Google makes the revenue from YouTube.
Tip: The AdSense ads on YouTube videos are
not randomly displayed ‘suddenly’. They appear at the time when you see the
small yellow point in the video progress bar. See the image above for details.
If there are multiple yellow points on the progress bar of your videos, then it
means the ad will be displayed multiple times.
You
can click on the small cross sign to close the ad every time it is displayed,
but the interruption is very inconvenient. Since there is no setting in YouTube
that will let you disable, block or remove YouTube ads, the only way to do this
is to use a browser extension that block those ads automatically. Adblock Plus
does exactly that. Adblock Plus is a browser extension or add-on available for
almost every available browser including Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera. Go
to the official page of Adblock Plus and install an
appropriate version for your browser, and then configure the filters in it as
needed. Also, instead of adding filters manually, you can simply use one of the
popular ad blocking lists from
here to automatically configure filters.
Once done, you will not see any AdSense ads on YouTube
videos anymore.
Note that once you have installed Adblock Plus, it will
not only remove ads from YouTube, but from all the websites you visit.
Fortunately, Adblock Plus also lets you view ads on specific websites. To
disable Adblock Plus on a specific website, open that website in your web
browser and click on the Adblock Plus icon in the toolbar. In the drop down
menu, select Disable on thiswebsite.com.
Why view Ads on any website? Since Google AdSense is a
contextual advertising network, it displays ads that are highly relevant to you
based on the content you are searching on Google or reading on other websites.
So you may want to actually see the AdSense ads on some websites if you are
looking for a quick fix for the issue at hand as the fix may be there is the
ads. Also, there are many websites that depend solely on the advertising
revenue. You may want to support those sites by viewing their ads.
Update: Adblock Plus is the only available working
browser extension that lets you remove, block and disable ads permanently from
YouTube. Other extensions such as Tubestop
and AdBlock are no longer
working, so they’re removed from this page.