I just signed up for Youtube premium to get rid of the political ads. I wish I did it sooner.

Not a bad idea. I've been saving my free trial for years. I'm used to ignoring and muting which is good enough.

Why would you pay Google just to rid ads. I don't remember the last time I saw an ad from YT.

Cough Cough...

AdBlock Plus.

Enhancer for YouTube. Free extension for most desktop browsers.

Update:
Just watch latest Spitting Image on their channel, ads every 5 minutes. I don't see them, but it stalls for a few seconds.

They must really be trying to suck more money out of us. It used to be that videos had maybe one ad at the beginning of the video - and you could click out of it in 5 seconds.

Now lots of ads do not let you click out, and now most of them are followed by a second ad. Then at various times throughout the video ads just pop up like TV shows.

Then lately they start an ad at the very end of a video too.

I used to love You-Tube ... now, not so much.

Also - used to be with the right app you could download any video that you liked, and now more and more videos are locked up so they cannot be downloaded.

I think I am not long until I quit YouTube.

The thing is that Youtube is so simple ... and their search algorithms so bad that maybe 20 people could keep it going and manage it - provided you had the cloud and compute resources behind it. It is really braindead simple-minded - it's all the contributors. The rest is store and play on demand.

Adblock + De-MSM for Youtube is free and you don't have to give google your money while they steal all of your data.

It was only years after I found out youtube added ads.

I have been using adblocker since forever, would of been when firefox was the go-to browser

I enjoy political ads especially the creative ones. Many good ones being made right now.