It is undeniable that youtube.com has become the main site for video content. A lot of those who create videos are also depending on the monetization aspects of that site. All of that is fine.

The challenge we have, in today’s context, is that there is an increasing amount of advertisements that are inserted into the video stream and does significantly lower the quality of the video watching experience.

There are many ways around what some would say the nuisance of advertisements, and all of this can be worked around by tools that offer you the option to download the video before watching. Or you could stream the video directly into tools like VideoLAN which will take the video stream and just play – minus the ads injected into the stream if it is played via a browser.

Tools I’ve used to optimize my time in video consumption are the following:

a) yt-dlp: a command line tool that is a feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader with support for thousands of sites. That project is a fork of youtube-dl based on the now inactive youtube-dlc. yt-dlp is in the public domain under a “unlicense license” which is pretty much like CC0.

b) yt-x: Browse YouTube from your terminal plus other sites yt-dlp supports. It is on an MIT License – which is just fine. yt-x is a very well written bash script of about 1,600 lines. Really clever and really well done.

What this has enabled me is complete control of my time in consuming videos – whether for leisure or for learning. I am far more productive and not being distracted by advertisements helps to keep me focused.

On my mobile phone, I use NewPipe, which is my default video watching tool that will get videos from YouTube.com, Peertube.org, Soundcloud.com , Bandcamp.com, and the Chaos Computer Club. NewPipe is available from F-Droid, the alternative, trusted Android app store to Google Playstore (which does not even allow NewPipe to be listed).

I do have another method as well, but because I don’t want that method to be abused, email me for what it is.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: how would the content creators get compensated if ads are stripped out.

Frankly, I have no idea how youtube.com actually counts the advertisement revenue. Is that revenue calculated because a video stream has a certain number of ads injected at the source, regardless that the consumption end striped it out? Or do the advertisements have to be played in order for the content provider be credited the fraction of a cent per stream?

I have no insights on how youtube.com does the accounting and if there is someone who could educate me about that, it would be useful.

In the meantime, I am assuming that the content creator is compensated if ads are inserted into their video stream and does not matter that the viewer stripped it out.