HACK YouTube

More than 30 million people visit YouTube every day to watch clips of TV shows, music videos, the latest ‘viral’ content and much more, making it the second most popular website in the world (after Google Search). Sadly, we suspect that many visitors have recently reached the same conclusion we have: YouTube is getting worse.

From unskippable ads and sponsored messages before almost every video to irrelevant ‘recommendations’ and poor streaming quality, the YouTube website and app have become increasingly frustrating and irritating to use. The once innovative service now reserves its best features - such as the ability to download videos and play them in the background - for its £11.99-per-month Premium subscribers - and has started removing options that viewers find useful, such as the dislike count.

With so much great content to watch for free, YouTube is difficult to ditch completely - unlike Google Search (see Issue 632, page 50). The good news is that there are plenty of ways you can ‘hack’ the video-sharing site to improve your viewing experience, either by installing special extensions in your browser or by tweaking hidden settings.

Here we explain how to fix common YouTube annoyances, add clever new features to the site, improve your streaming quality and protect your privacy so Google doesn’t watch you while you’re watching YouTube.

MAKE YOUTUBE LESS ANNOYING

Block adverts in YouTube videos

YouTube seems to show more adverts than ever these days, sometimes making you sit through two or even three non-skippable ads before you can start watching a video. It may also interrupt your viewing with ‘mid-roll’ commercial breaks, especially during longer content, and even play an ad after a video has finished. Many standard ad blockers can no longer combat this nuisance, so unless you pay £11.99 per month to subscribe to ad-free YouTube Premium, there seems to be no escape.

Thankfully, there is a solution in the form of ‘Adblock for Youtube’, a brilliant extension for Chrome and other Chromium browsers (www.snipca.com/42128) and Firefox (www.snipca.com/42129). Once installed, this add-on automatically blocks all adverts that appear before, during and after YouTube videos, with no need for any configuration - though you can disable ad blocking if you want to support specific content creators.

Occasionally, there’s a brief pause before a video starts playing,