How to see your videos
This is hardly news, it’s been going on for a good few months now. I use a browser called Vivaldi, which has an adblocker built in. So advertisements are blocked on every site unless I make an exception for named sites. It was earlier this year that I started getting messages telling me to stop adblocking YouTube, then they got rather less polite, and finally I ended up with this message when I tried to run a YouTube video.
I wonder whether the second bullet point should read:
- Ads allow YouTube to make billions worldwide.
Do I object to ads? Well, not out of principle, but what I object to are ads that cut in at points in a video that spoil the video. I can’t say I mind a few seconds before a video starts. I wouldn’t even mind if they put a small oblong in the corner of a playing video which carried an advert. But being in the middle of listening to a song, then an advert cuts in! Then the music resumes after the advert. That spoils the entertainment totally.
Is there anything you can do about it?
1. Pay up
You can, of course, subscribe to YouTube, by paying a monthly fee. But you know what gets me? Even being on the internet isn’t cheap and times are hard. Here in Britain, we have people relying on food-banks: not just the sick, disabled or unemployed, either. People with jobs are, in many cases, so low-paid that they have to rely on certain benefits, rent rebates, and, yes, food-banks to heat their homes, and to feed and clothe themselves and their children. So, plainly, this is not an option for everyone.
These days, people who survive on benefits are expected to have internet access in order to make and maintain their claims. But it’s not cheap. If you’re on a low income, £25 or so per month is a lot of money, as is the cost of the electricity to keep your computer system powered up. So just having access to YouTube, and other online services that want your money, is already taking a huge chunk out their income.
2. Use FreeTube or a similar program
The wonderful thing about FreeTube (website) is that it not only plays YouTube videos without adverts and without you having to pay, but, and more importantly to many people, it allows you to watch them without being tracked, or your private information being collected and sold. For many, this is equally important to having to pay. Indeed, this is the “unique selling point” that FreeTube uses on its web site.
With FreeTube, you can “Subscribe” to various content providers, but it’s not the same as Subscribing on YouTube itself. It just maintains a local list for you to use. I don’t think it goes towards the provider’s total.
3. Use an Invidious website
“Invidious” is a piece of software that’s hosted at multiple sites around the world. You can find a list of sites, which is constantly being updated as some are closed down and others pop up. Still, all you have to do is save a link to the list in your bookmarks, and then select one of the sites from there. FreeTube actually works by using Invidious sites.
You can log into an Invidious instance which allows you to Subscribe in the same way as you do in FreeTube, but if you have to change invidious sites, everything is lost. Just look at it as a way of playing videos.
4. Going Incognito
Many internet browsers, including Vivaldi, have an “Incognito” mode where pages don’t automatically log in, and settings aren’t saved between sessions. It seems that YouTube not only detects the adblocker, but binds it to your Google account, so that it remembers nothing between sessions. The upshot of this is that it doesn’t stop your incognito browser from playing back videos. This way, you can’t Subscribe to any channels like you can with FreeTube, or even temporarily as you can with Incognito.
5. Downloading videos from YouTube
In Linux, there is a command-line program (i.e., you have to run it in a terminal — the equivalent of a command window in Windows) called youtube-dl that you can use to download video files from YouTube. There are programs that do the same thing via a Graphical User Interface. I don’t know of any for Windows though I would think they exist.
Commenting on Videos
You can only comment on videos in YouTube, and being logged in. You can’t comment from any of the alternatives. Funnily enough, YouTube does not stop you doing this, it only stops you playing the video. So if you want to make a comment, you will have to find the video in YouTube, and comment there. In many cases, you will have searched for video in YouTube anyway, before copying and pasting the URL into Invidious or Freetube, or your incognito browser.
On Android Phones
There’s also a program called FreeTube available on Android, and despite the fact that it gives you access to YouTube videos without ads or subscription, it is available on Google’s Play Store! It’s totally different to FreeTube for Linux, Mac or Windows though. I would recommend a different Android app called NewPipe. You can’t install it directly from Play Store, you need to go to their site and install it from there.
Conclusion
I’m sure that there are many other ways to see videos on YouTube without getting annoying ads or paying money that you can’t afford. People in the past started using Freetube, Invidious and NewPipe, as well as former apps like Vanced, because they didn’t want to be tracked by Google. It wasn’t about the ads or the money! Well Google’s crackdown on adblockers has resulted in a big upsurge in use of these applications. If they had any sense, they would have just kept quiet about it and took the money that was coming in. The upshot of this will be that these apps will become increasingly popular and Google (and others) will be constantly chasing more and more sophisticated ways of bypassing restrictions they put on their sites, which may have a knock on effect affecting other paid content providers.
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