Weird. I've been running AdBlock and AdGuard for years and nary an issue with youtube. I just never see ads there.

FWIW it was only when I added a vpn to my mix that I started being made to submit to captchas whenever I do anything like search

This is the best summary I could come up with:

After beginning to roll out a healthy nudge to turn off ad blockers or subscribe to the platform’s ad-free Premium offering, YouTube is now forcing users’ hands.

As users continue to trawl the depths of YouTube, they will now be greeted with a pop-up warning them to disable their ad blocker saying “video playback is blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled.” This notification began popping up for users across the platform earlier this month, but it was as simple as shrugging it off by closing out the message.

Shortly thereafter, YouTube forced users to acknowledge the message but still allowed them to exit out of it after a brief timer elapsed.

YouTube communications manager Christopher Lawton told The Verge Tuesday that using an ad blocker is actually against the platform’s terms of service.

He also told the outlet that “ads support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube.”

Around the same time, the company reported its third straight quarterly decline in ad revenue, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The original article contains 320 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 43%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I use a whitelist firewall. It is like a lock on my front door. I don't use an adblocker. I manually add only websites I wish to visit. Extorting me for only visiting websites I trust and wish to visit is criminal. I am the reason Ad Blocks are a thing. They are the lazy person's mostly effective whitelist firewall.

All ads are are serving you another website you didn't ask to visit and with unknown bad actors that are not effectively vetted. Ads are like a house party in your home where one of your guests opens a window in your bathroom and let's a dozen random people into your home without your knowledge. The person that let them in sneaks around the hidden guests while trying to prevent you from noticing. It is criminal behavior. This is privateering, aka pirates that have a legal charter from a criminal government.

Im using Yattee on iOS with no issue. From the damn App Store, don’t think they’re cracking down very well.

Looks like YouTube is the next tower to fall.

I've already switched to Freetube on my PC, and New.piped on my phone.

I don't understand why YouTube doesn't just put the video ads in-stream, just seems stupid for stupid's sake at this point.

Using AdGuard on macOS and iOS. Works fine