Ads have become an almost unavoidable part of the online experience, especially on platforms like YouTube. While these ads are a primary revenue source for creators and the platform itself, many users find them disruptive to their viewing experience.
Whether you’re tired of frequent interruptions during videos, frustrated by un-skippable ads, or simply looking for a smoother, ad-free experience, there are a variety of solutions to block, reduce and remove ads on YouTube.
In this article, we’ll explore different methods, from browser extensions to YouTube’s premium subscription, and weigh the pros and cons of each approach to help you find the best option for your needs.
Update: As of 2024, further improvements have been made to YouTube ad blocking in Magic Lasso Adblock. Read about the updates, including our response to YouTube’s anti-ad block approaches, in the latest Insights post.
On this page
- How to block YouTube ads using YouTube Premium
- How to block YouTube ads using Magic Lasso Adblock
- How to block YouTube ads using a VPN or Pi-hole
- How to block YouTube ads using other ad blockers
- What’s the best way to block YouTube ads in 2024?
- Overall Recommendations to block YouTube ads
How to block YouTube ads using YouTube Premium
YouTube Premium is a subscription-based service that offers an enhanced, ad-free experience across all of YouTube’s platforms.
What does YouTube Premium cost?
For a fee of $13.99 per month, you get uninterrupted video playback on YouTube, meaning you won’t have to watch ads before, during, or after videos.
In addition to eliminating ads, YouTube Premium also provides some other benefits, such as the ability to download videos for offline viewing and access to YouTube Music. YouTube Premium also enables background playback, allowing videos to continue playing while using other apps or when the screen is off.
Pros and Cons of YouTube Premium
YouTube Premium is ideal for frequent YouTube users who want a more seamless and premium viewing experience, without the distractions and limitations of traditional ad-supported content.
The benefits of YouTube Premium is that it will work across all the devices and places you would view YouTube content, including the YouTube website, iOS and Android apps and smart TV platforms. It also includes some smaller additional features but these are most likely not of high value to most users.
The cons with YouTube Premium is its relatively high cost.
At $13.99 per month or almost $168 per year, YouTube Premium does not come cheap. There are family and student plans available that could reduce your overall expenditure, along with a 30 day free trial available, but it wouldn’t be suitable if you’re looking for value.
How to block YouTube ads using Magic Lasso Adblock
Magic Lasso Adblock is a fast, efficient and high performance ad blocker for the iPhone, iPad and Mac with native Safari integration.
Included in Magic Lasso is best in class YouTube ad blocking that blocks over 10 types of YouTube ads in Safari, including video ads, banner ads, search ads and paid suggested product and merchandising ads.
Magic Lasso delivers full YouTube ad blocking in Safari while respecting your privacy.
What does Magic Lasso Adblock cost?
After the free in-app 30 day trial, Magic Lasso Adblock costs $2.49 per month or $29.99 per year, which is less than one-fifth of YouTube Premium’s cost.
Family Sharing is also included with Magic Lasso Adblock, so you can block YouTube ads on both your own and your family’s devices for no extra cost. In comparison, you need to pay almost double the standard YouTube Premium cost, a staggering $395 per year, to share YouTube Premium with your family members.
Along with blocking YouTube ads, Magic Lasso also includes complete ad, tracker and annoyance blocking on all the websites you browse in Safari on the iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Pros and Cons of Magic Lasso Adblock
As Magic Lasso works as a browser extension, it will only block YouTube ads when viewed through the Safari web browser. So unfortunately, it won’t block YouTube ads when viewed directly through the YouTube app or on a smart TV.
Magic Lasso is ideal for Apple platform users who use Safari and view YouTube videos through the browser. As part of the subscription, you’ll also experience 2x faster web browsing, stop being followed by ads around the web and can block all those online annoyances such as cookie notices and privacy prompts.
YouTube ad blocking via browser extensions are usually thwart with issues as YouTube continues to try and blunt their effectiveness. The benefit of Magic Lasso Adblock is that it is regularly and frequently updated to ensure this doesn’t become a problem. YouTube ad blocking in Magic Lasso is also easy to setup and easy to keep up to date.
How to block YouTube ads using a VPN or Pi-hole
If you’re looking for other methods to block ads on YouTube with or without paying for a subscription, tools like VPNs or Pi-hole may provide an alternative, but more limited solution.
These approaches work by either filtering or redirecting internet traffic to block advertisements from loading, providing a reduced ad experience across your devices.
In this section, we’ll explore how each of these tools works, and their effectiveness in blocking YouTube ads. Some of these solutions, such as Pi-hole, are for more tech-savvy users.
What does a VPN or Pi-hole cost?
There are thousands of VPN providers available, all at different price points with varying privacy policies and approaches. Irrespective of the VPN provider you select, there is usually a monthly or yearly cost to use the service, however there are also some rare providers that may offer a lifetime subscription option.
On the other hand, as an open source product, Pi-hole is free to use but is quite complex to install and setup correctly. As an open-source product, support for Pi-hole is via the online community resources and not directly via a vendor.
Pros and Cons of using a VPN or Pi-hole to block YouTube ads
Both VPNs and Pi-hole work by viewing your internet traffic and then filtering out any requests that may be considered a request to an ad serving domain or URL.
As they work at the network level, the benefit is that VPNs and Pi-hole can filter all of your internet traffic and therefore can blocks requests on all apps on a device, and also all devices on your network.
Unfortunately due to the way that YouTube video ads are served, network based internet filters cannot reliably block pre-roll and mid-roll YouTube ads. So at best, you will only be able to block some banner and search ads on YouTube using these tools.
From a privacy perspective, you also need to fully trust any VPN you select.
When a VPN is active, all of your network traffic is routed through the service. This allows the VPN provider to potentially see any domains you visit on any device accessing the internet.
How to block YouTube ads using other ad blockers
There are many ad blockers available in the marketplace which provide variable YouTube ad blocking effectiveness.
As an ad blocker developer ourselves, we understand the difficulty, time and effort that goes into providing a best-in-class approach. And let us say, developing and keeping an effective YouTube ad blocker up to date is not for the faint of heart!
Pros and Cons of using other ad blockers to block YouTube ads
To properly block video ads in YouTube requires the use of multiple different techniques, which goes beyond simply blocking certain domains or elements on a YouTube web page.
All the while, as YouTube is owned by the world’s largest advertising company, the service is constantly evolving and attempting to evade known ad blocking techniques.
Some ad blockers may block some YouTube banner ads, but fail to block in-video ads. Some may block in-video ads only for logged-out users but fail when you are logged into your YouTube account. And some may work for a month or so but then break when YouTube rolls out a limited functional anti-ad block test to a cohort of its user base.
All to say that finding a good ad blocker that also blocks YouTube ads effectively can be a difficult task.
From a knowledgable – though biased source – if you use an iPhone, iPad or Mac, then we’d recommend our app Magic Lasso Adblock. For over 4 years, we have constantly developed, iterated and improved our YouTube ad blocking approach.
The downside of our app is that it only works on Apple platforms. So, if you don’t use an Apple device, other ad blockers may provide a good alternative solution.
What’s the best way to block YouTube ads in 2024?
We’ve looked at multiple methods to block YouTube ads, considering the pros and cons of each approach. As the YouTube ad blocking landscape tends to change rather quickly we’ve provided a summary of the findings below.
We also detail our overall recommendations to block YouTube ads in the next section.
| Blocks all YouTube ads | Monthly Cost | Supported platforms | Overall Recommendation | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| YouTube Premium | ✔ | $13.99 | All | Recommended |
| Magic Lasso Adblock | ✔ | $2.49 | Safari | Recommended |
| VPN | - | Variable | All | Not Recommended |
| Pi-hole | - | Free | All | Not Recommended |
| Other ad blockers(1) | - | Variable | Variable | Variable Recommendation |
1 Due to the multitude of differing ad blockers available, the capabilities, cost and supported platforms are variable and dependent upon the specific ad blocker, its features and implementation.
Overall Recommendations to block YouTube ads
If cost is no object, YouTube Premium is the quickest but most expensive way to get an ad free YouTube experience.
It works across both the YouTube app and website, on all devices, including on smart TVs. At almost $170 per year though, or $395 per year for a family, it is certainly not a cost effective way to remove YouTube ads.
However, if you want to spend less money, but still get best in class YouTube ad blocking on your iPhone, iPad or Mac, then we’d suggest you try Magic Lasso Adblock.
It is less than one fifth the cost of YouTube Premium, blocks all YouTube ads in Safari and also blocks all other ads, trackers and annoyances while doubling your web browsing speed.
If you really want to block YouTube video ads, then we wouldn’t recommend using a VPN, Pi-hole or a less sophisticated ad blocker for this task.
Although these solutions may block some banner ads appearing on the YouTube website and app, they will not be able to block the most annoying of YouTube ads which are the pre-roll and mid-roll video ads.
