In the past few days, there have been several announcements about YouTube testing new, disruptive ad tech designed to break currently-working ad blockers. This encouraged me to go back and dig up a comment that I wrote a few months ago so I could publish it as a post.
Basically, there are a couple of ways to avoid ads – using a VPN or changing your designated YouTube account location – that even all this new ad tech can’t disrupt. A detailed explanation and instructions follow.
Firstly, you need to know that YouTube doesn’t show ads everywhere. For certain economic, legal, and cultural reasons, YouTube only shows ads in apprx. 110 countries, listed at the link below.
This means that it doesn’t show ads in apprx. 90 countries, listed below:
- Afghanistan
- Albania (Available as a VPN server location option on Surfshark, NordVPN, Proton VPN paid, Windscribe paid.)
- Andorra
- Angola
- Antigua and Barbuda
- Armenia (Available as a VPN server location option on Surfshark, NordVPN.)
- Bahamas (Available as a VPN server location option on Surfshark, ExpressVPN.)
- Barbados
- Belize (Available as a VPN server location option on Surfshark.)
- Benin
- Bhutan (Available as a VPN server location option on Surfshark.)
- Botswana
- Brunei (Available as a VPN server location option on Surfshark.)
- Burkina Faso
- Burundi
- Cameroon
- Cape Verde
- Central African Republic
- Chad
- China (Available as a VPN server location option on AdGuard VPN.)
- Comoros
- Congo, Democratic Republic of the
- Congo, Republic of the
- Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast)
- Cuba (Available as a VPN server location option on ExpressVPN.)
- Djibouti
- Dominica
- Equatorial Guinea
- Eritrea
- Eswatini (formerly Swaziland)
- Ethiopia
- Fiji
- Gabon
- Gambia
- Grenada
- Guinea
- Guinea-Bissau
- Guyana
- Haiti
- Kiribati
- Kosovo
- Kyrgyzstan
- Lesotho
- Liberia
- Madagascar
- Malawi
- Maldives
- Mali
- Marshall Islands
- Mauritania
- Mauritius
- Micronesia, Federated States of
- Monaco
- Mongolia
- Mozambique
- Myanmar (formerly Burma) (Available as a VPN server location option on Surfshark.)
- Namibia
- Nauru
- Niger
- Palau
- Palestine
- Papua New Guinea
- Russia (Available as a VPN server location option on most good VPN providers.)
- Rwanda
- Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (Western Sahara)
- Saint Kitts and Nevis
- Saint Lucia
- Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
- Samoa
- San Marino
- Sao Tome and Principe
- Seychelles
- Sierra Leone
- Solomon Islands
- Somalia
- South Sudan
- Sudan
- Suriname
- Syria
- Tajikistan
- Timor-Leste, Democratic Republic of (formerly East Timor)
- Togo
- Tonga
- Trinidad and Tobago
- Turkmenistan (YouTube may be blocked here, so this may not be an appropriate choice for VPN use.)
- Tuvalu
- Uzbekistan (Available as a VPN server location option on Surfshark.)
- Vanuatu
- Vatican City
- Zambia
Now, it turns out that, if you use a VPN with one of the apprx. 90 countries listed above as the server location, you get no YouTube ads.
It also turns out that, if you set your designated YouTube account location (Profile Picture → Settings → General → Location) to one of the apprx. 90 countries listed above, you also get no YouTube ads. However, note that, out of the apprx. 90 countries listed above, only 2 are offered as location options:
- Papua New Guinea
- Russia
So you would have to set one of the 2 countries listed above as your designated YouTube account location to avoid ads.
Edit: Some users are reporting that changing the designated YouTube location isn’t working to stop YouTube ads. So your results may vary. If this doesn’t work for you, try VPN’ing to one of the YouTube-ad-free countries, instead.
Also note that using a VPN or changing your designated YouTube account location may impact the content that the YouTube feed shows you. In that case, you may have to retrain your YouTube feed for a while to get it back to a state that you like.
On the upside, however, both of these tricks should avoid ads on any YouTube client and on any platform, including Android, iOS, KaiOS, niche mobile OSes, all desktop OSes, smart TVs, TV boxes, video game consoles, etc. Enjoy.
With thanks to /u/ndI1107 who originally brought up this idea on this subreddit and to /u/VTSGsRock who provided several corrections to the ad-free country list I originally posted.
