YouTube is now the second largest internet search engine after Google.com with more than 4 billion videos served daily. This popularity of YouTube is being used by many video publishers to monetize their channels. And to help publishers monetize video channels and generate revenue Google allows channel partners to display ads available in various formats. The popular ones being in-stream video ad that appear before a user watches a video on YouTube and in-video ads is overlay image or text ad that pops-up while a video is being played. Whatever be the ad format having them automatically pop-up while watching a video can be annoying. While YouTube allows its users skip the ad after 5 secs or close the overlay image/ text ads doing that for all videos is a waste of time, especially if you are an avid YouTuber. So how exactly can you get rid of these ads thus enhancing YouTube experience. Well, browser add-ons to the rescue.
Related post: Set Default YouTube Video Quality With Player Style Using Chrome Extension
There are few Chrome, Safari and Firefox browser add-ons that can skip and block streaming video ads during playback. Once installed you get to play with options that lets you customize YouTube player options. Here are the best video ad blocking extensions/ add-ons available for Chrome and Firefox browsers that can remove in-stream video ads. Note that these browser add-ons can block ads only on user or channel pages and not on videos embedded on websites, blog posts or other social networking sites.
Chrome and Safari Extensions:
YouTube Options for Google Chrome and Safari is a feature rich extension that not only lets you block in-stream video or overlay image ads but also remove various other page elements to make it look clutter free. The full feature set includes option to disable ads, annotations, prevent autoplay, set default playback resolution, display size, stop auto buffering and also set videos to replay in loops. Another feature worth mentioning is the download links that is automatically placed below YouTube videos. Based on the uploaded video quality you can download it in WebM, MP4 and FLV formats.
Install YouTube Options,
Firefox add-on:
With AdBlockVideo add-on for Firefox you can get rid of pesky in-stream YouTube video ads with flip of a button on top of the browser. Install this add-on and you can forget about the ads. AdBlockVideo add-on also works with popular sites like CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox. But unlike the extensions mentioned above, this Firefox add-on doesn’t provide you with many options to play with. Also the 7.3 MB size of this add-on (.xpi) can be a turn-off factor for some. But according to the developers larger size of .xpi file accounts to the native code used to support multiple systems and it doesn’t affect browser performance.
Note that this add-on is compatible with Firefox 6 and 7. So if you have installed Firefox 8 beta and above you will have to switch back to an older version.
Install AdBlockVideo on Firefox
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