Also I have heard multiple youtube videos publicly state (maybe speculatively?) that opting out of mid-roll ads will make Youtube reduce the rate at which their videos are presented to the audience.

The Youtube ad experience has become almost intolerably bad in the past few months. I’m considering just always downloading their videos to my local machine before trying to watch them, even though it’s substantially less convenient.

If you watch so much youtube consider paying the monthly subscription that removes ads which you hate supports the content creators which you seem to enjoy. From what I understand content creators make more money from that than ads. Once google gave the option to remove ads by paying for subscription anyone complaining about ads is wrong as now it's now about the ads but you not willing to pay for the content you want to consume.

Until they introduce ads again for paying subscribers. You never know what they have in store for you in the future when you subscribe.

Unsubscribe then? You're likely paying monthly anyway.

YouTube premium is awesome.

I use ublock origin on Firefox and have never seen an ad on youtube. No idea why people don't do this. I will probably eventually pay for premium but would be better off just supporting people through patreon directly.

I swear I must be crazy, I've been using uBlock Origin on FF for years now and YouTube ads have never been blocked for me, whether it's Windows, macOS, Android, I always get them.

You might have disabled some of the default filter lists.

Because only some of us can do this. If too many of us do it Google will work around it.

> Because only some of us can do this. If too many of us do it Google will work around it.

How do you expect Google to keep YouTube running if you don't want to watch ads AND also don't want to pay for premium? I understand using adblocker on shitty websites (and you could argue that YouTube is one of those with frequent ads) but then you should pay for premium. Just my 2 cents.

They already have a few times - videos would just not play if an adblocker is enabled. Tends to only last about a week.

They will, and the day they make you watch 10 ads in a 5 minutes video the viewership will progressively drop to zero.

Cable television proved this is not true. Viewership will drop to zero when something better comes along - and that something better may or may not have ads. But most people seem to have a very, very high tolerance for watching ads if there's no better option.