As a YouTube creator whose livelihood depends on those ads, I wouldn't feel right teaching anyone how to bypass them. If there's a way to do it, I certainly wouldn't share it.

To me, it's no different than pirating software, movies, music, or other digital content. Creators deserve to be compensated for the work they produce. I know some people justify it by saying, "The movie studios and musicians already make millions," but that's a lot different from small independent creators on YouTube. Many of us rely on that ad revenue to help pay the bills.

I'll admit that 20-year-old me didn't always see it that way. Back in the Napster and BitTorrent days, I sometimes justified downloading something by telling myself, "I wasn't going to buy it anyway." Looking back, I think that was a pretty immature way to look at it. Fifty-something me has a lot more appreciation for the time and effort that goes into creating something people enjoy.

If you don't want to watch ads, I'd recommend YouTube Premium. It gives you an ad-free experience, and creators still get compensated for their work. That seems like the best solution for everyone involved.

There have been massive updates to Chrome recently that restricts how ad blockers work with chrome. YouTube is aggressively escalating it's war on ad blockers by closing loopholes.  The official enforcement is that YouTube policy explicitly prohibits ad blockers, and ward viewers to allow adds or sign up for YouTube Premium to watch videos uninterupted.

Ah the days of Napster. My wife would use all those excuses. I wasn't going to buy it anyways. The artist made tons of money from it... (not likely - the Record label sure). I too fell into that rabbit hole, but my rational was I already own that album/song as it - I just don't have the means of digitizing it, and I really want it on my mp3 player.

Jeffrey yeah, that's kind of how I felt with music, like Rush, for example. I had already owned every Rush album and cassette and CD, sometimes multiple times, and so it was just faster to grab it off a Napster than it was to try to digitize my own CD collection, even though I did some of that too. Not only that, I bought all of their stuff, but I also went to every concert, and so I had no problems with downloading Rush. It was music I already "owned" the rights to listen to.

I do love what we have today, where I can just pay a certain price per month to Amazon Music and just listen to whatever I want ad-free. It's the same thing with YouTube. I pay for YouTube premium so that I don't have to watch ads. I watch it at night all the time before I go to bed. Science, nerdy stuff.

So if you want an ad-free YouTube experience, then pay for it. It's not expensive, and it takes care of creators like me who depend on that revenue.

At this point, YouTube Premium is your best option if you don’t want ads. Cheapest plan is only $8.99* a month.

* As of the time of this post. Don’t blame me if Google decides to change this in the future LOL