Use This Extension to Block YouTube Ads

There are many ways to watch YouTube without ads (I highly recommend YouTube Premium). But even if you shell out $13.99 a month to remove autoplay ads on YouTube, you still won’t be able to get rid of sponsored ads. No matter how you watch YouTube, a popular creator can still place an ad in the middle of a video without being able to automatically skip it.

Of course, there is nothing against sponsored advertising: at least it is transparent, because the author worked directly with the company, and not an algorithm that suggests something useless. The problem is that you can spend a lot of time looking at the same Squarespace ad done a little differently.

To solve this problem, you can turn to a free and open source crowdsourcing extension: SponsorBlock for YouTube . Volunteers are sent to the platform to “skip segments” when they find a video with an ad they read. So far, these users have submitted over 15 million missed segments, spanning a wide range of YouTube channels. I found missing segments even in accounts with around 100,000 followers.

The extension is available in all popular browsers and even in third-party ad-free apps like LibreTube . If you’re using Android TV, SponsorBlock is integrated into SmartTubeNext – the best way to block YouTube ads on Android TV . And if you’re really feeling motivated, you can run iSponsorBlockTV on your computer, which can block YouTube adverts for smart TVs and Apple TVs.

However, the easiest way is to use a browser extension. Once installed and running, you’ll see a handy green color for the sponsored segment. By default, the video automatically skips the ad, but you can skip to the end of the ad using the red highlight marker.

If you dive deeper into the extension’s settings, you can whitelist the channel you want to see sponsored videos for and disable auto-skip if you want. If you come across a video that doesn’t have a sponsored segment marked, you can use the Submit feature to submit your own segment, which will help the community watch fewer sponsored ads.