In recent years, YouTube has made several modifications that seem to have led to more ads. Many advertisers – including the UK government – pulled their ads from the platform.

However, it's not always been plain sailing – the 2017 ' adpocalypse' saw significant numbers of creators lose the ability to monetize their channels over content YouTube deemed 'extreme'. YouTube made $28.8 billion in ad revenue in 2021! If product promotion was prohibited on the platform, YouTube would have little capital with which to pay the creators that make the content on their platform and, in turn, attract its vast audience. Just like most other social media sites, YouTube rakes in the bulk of its profits from advertising.

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Fortunately, there's a simple way to stop them from popping up, and this guide will show you how you can watch YouTube videos without ads by using an ad-blocker. Infuriatingly, this means adverts showing up multiple times throughout a video is now commonplace. Millions of people visit YouTube every day – which is why so many companies use it to advertise their products.

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