TFN#56: 🪜Block annoying ads on the web and YouTube

Imagine, you wake up in a 9 square meter room. There are screens all around you. You go to some physical labour work in the morning and come back to your room, which is also your home and spend the rest of the day playing video games and watching TV on the screens around you. The screens are the only source of joy in your life.

Sometimes they show advertisements, if you don’t want to watch them, you can pay and skip the ads. BUT, there are ads that you can’t skip. You can’t close your eyes. You have to watch those ads. If you close your eyes, the screens will scream at you with “Resume Viewing” prompts, until you open your eyes.

Scene from Fifteen Million Merits episode from Netflix show Black Mirror

That’s the plot of the famous dystopian Sci-Fi series Black Mirror’s 2011 episode “Fifteen Million Merits”. It is disturbing.

If you think about it, our present world is no different. We live in the world of advertisements. And we have sort of accepted this norm.

We can’t watch a funny YouTube video without clicking “skip ad” and sometimes, there is no “skip ad” option. We HAVE TO keep our eyes open. The whole business model is quite a scam and silly, but I will write about it someday later.

Today, let’s focus on how to get rid of most of the ads on the web pages.

For more than 8 years, I have used an extension named Adblock Plus.

Until recently, it used to remove all YouTube ads too! But no more, so I also use another extension that removes YouTube ads.

All in all, two extensions to remove annoying ads:

​Adblock Plus​
​Adblock for YouTube​

How to use them?

Once you install them on your browser, you don’t have to do anything. These extensions work in the background and remove the ads.

It wasn’t until 2 years back that I learned that YouTube showed ads! Because YouTube started forcing users to disable the extension.

Do they work?

Let’s see an example in action for Adblock Plus.
For testing, I have navigated to this news article from The Hindu.

This is how the webpage looks like with Adblocker enabled:

When I clicked the Adblocker extension, it told me that 30 ads were removed from the page. Nice.

Now, let’s disable the Adblocker for only this website, by toggling the button.

When refreshed, the webpage looks like this:

Notice that the ABP logo in the toolbar is greyed out, indicating it is disabled on this web page

A huge Zoho ad greets me. And many other ads as I scroll down to read.
Same thing for YouTube ads. You get the idea.
So, these extensions work.

It is not just about annoyance, but also privacy

Apart from the peace of mind that you get by removing annoying ads, the main benefit is the removal of spying trackers and dangerous ads.
One can argue that we are cutting the source of income from the business by removing ads. But that’s beside the point, because if the business needs to place 30 intrusive ads—which ads? they have no idea—in the name of business, then it is not a business.
In any case, we can disable the ads on websites that genuinely serve well and don’t clog your browser with ads.

Do you use any adblockers? Any better extension?
​Hit Reply and share it with me!

Also, if you find these letters useful, go ahead and share them with your colleagues and friends.

Reads of the week:

I loved this piece by Anthony Lane. In this long essay with sort of a notorious tone, he dives into the past and present processes of condensing books.

But mainly, the rise of book summarizer services such as Blinkit prompts us to ask some questions:

• What is left out when we summarize a 400-page book into 5 pages?
• Did the author mean to speak in modern business lingo?
• Did Jane Austen have romance on her mind in her time?
• Do we summarize so that we can bring up the book/or author in a party conversation?
• Reading book summary vs. Not reading books at all: what is better?