Alternatively, there's a whole list of countries by monetisation status here:

https://isthischannelmonetized.com/youtube-monetization-coun...

So in theory accessing YouTube via a VPN server in one of those non monetised countries should give you ad free YouTube.

Tried a few, but it's still waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too slower to go via VPN than having uBlock Origin.

Why does YouTube allow people to access it in Albania? Surely if a country doesn't let you make money from your service you'd withdraw from it, or possibly require Albanians to pay for YouTube premium to access it.

Another possibility is that they want to quell competition. If Albanians couldn't watch YouTube, that would create a ripe market for a YouTube alternative to make a name for itself. From there, it could expand to other countries in the region, and then maybe to Europe as a whole.

How would such a company pay for those bandwidth costs? YouTube was famously unprofitable until long after the Google acquisition. I don’t think the EU markets would provide as long an investment runway as YouTube got for this theoretical competitor.

I presume the same way YouTube, Amazon, Uber, etc., did it: by operating in the red and getting funded.

I think there are likely a lot of VCs who would be very interested in having a stake in a serious competitor to YouTube.

Albania is a small and poor country, the three million albanians probably don't cause them significant server costs, and they couldn't afford Youtube Premium anyway.

Because Albanians help boost numbers on videos where monitization is viable, thus making the platform look more appealing to advertisers.

That would destroy their position as the one and only video hosting service in Albania and likely spread to other countries.

Because people still watch Youtube and Youtube can legally add these people to the viewcount and then sell that viewcount to the buyers of ads.

Why do the buyers of ads care? I don't get it. They only care about impressions of ads.

Because Youtube 'sells' the viewcount as a substitute for the impressions. 'Hey, look! This video had 55M views! Imagine how many buyers you could have!'

That makes absolutely no sense. The advertisers can't advertise to Albanian so they can't pay for neither impressions nor clicks.

If you mean that the goal of this is to attract advertisers by seeing a larger view count, then that doesn't make any sense either as I don't think there's any doubt among advertisers that YouTube is the leading video platform online.

"Bigger number = better" marketing is still easier than something more fine-grained, even if YT is the leading platform.

Mullvad have two servers in Albania, I guess they will be busy these days.

I guess I can set my geolocation to Albania / Russia to evade the ads?

It’s barely possible to listen to music with Youtube nowadays, the amount of ads is astonishing.

Invidious instances, in any browser.

NewPipe on Android.

ublock origin seems to work fine still

Also, YouTube stopped to show ads to Russian users :-)

Terrible idea. That will just incentivize people to invade other countries so that they can avoid seeing ads. /s

You underestimate how much frustration is boiling at the amount of ad breaks on YouTube videos.

It only takes one political opportunist to channel it...

That doesn’t seem to be working for us here in America. Do you think we should invade another country?

I stopped getting any ad-block prevention warnings from YouTube a while ago anyways, I guess maybe uBlock has had some update? Is it still a problem for some people?

I get a random series of letters that 'sound ok' captchas, ie "surfipol". Which means they know i know they know what I'm using.

You get letter based captchas? on YouTube? I think I have never gotten a captcha on YouTube, even though I occasionally use a VPN and always an ad blocker.

If I get a captcha from a Google site it's always the image grid one, haven't seen a letter based captcha from Google in years.

Peculiar little 'hack' for circumventing the adds if you still insist on not running uBlock Origin or refrain from upgrading to FF.

Why do people not run uBlock Origin? What's the case against?

I read the TOS as giving google the right to terminate my Google account.

And to be fair, video is expensive. Ads give both Google and the creators a return on their money.

Edit: just to clarify; I run ublock disabled on Youtube.com

Because YouTube is a poor little company that definitely doesn’t deserve to die.

I recall seeing some mental gymnastics about ads and effective altruism. I'm not sure the authors understood either ads or effective altruism.

There's no evidence that ads are "illegal", just that they aren't served.

This article has more information on the process to get advertising on YouTube in Albania:

https://euronews.al/en/will-youtube-be-launched-to-albania-a...

Also Burma, Moldova, Mongolia, Monaco, Mozambique, Myanmar and that one country to the East:

https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/198b6ah/this_guy_h...

AdSense is also unavailable in Kosovo.

Not sure if it's actually an issue of legality per se.

I live in a country with no youtube ads. Zero. It's heaven.

Damn too bad that ProtonVPN has no servers in Albania.