It's one thing to hate a company and refuse to use their products and a whole nother thing to promote products that sidestep features the service asks money for.
It's one thing to hate a company and refuse to use their products and a whole nother thing to promote products that sidestep features the service asks money for.
With that I have almost exhausted the list of ads that Google thought has been relevant for me since I started dating my wife well over a decade ago.
Why they cannot show ads for family holidays, programming conferences, local stores etc I don't know but if I had to guess I'd say they could need some diversity on their teams ;-). (Adding a few married parents with stable marriages and small children should do the trick, but I am not interested and haven't been for a couple of years, I find Google close to disgusting sometimes and whatever technical edge it has has disappeared to the degree that I'm positively surprised to just see sane results like they used to be in 2007.)
The corollary of that is that any interaction with such a company is unethical, since it encourages them to continue the manipulation on people who may not be as aware or resistant.
I therefore assume you've routed YouTube.com to :: ?
For a number of years I allowed them to run JS on my device and download ads from other servers to my device.
I have now instructed my rendering device to not do that. Even as a devout christian that doesn't feel unethical.
I'm free to try to avoid the ads, they are free (within limits) to get me to view ads.
A pro tip in that regard would be to make the ads relevant and unobtrusive.
A good first step here would be to include them statically on the server side and make sure they don't contain any moving or noisy elements.
Another good idea would be to select ads not solely on what company they can fleece for most money by showing me irrelevant ads but also factor in if the ad is in any way relevant.
https://curiositystream.com/legaleagle/
Some content creators on YT (such as Legal Eagle, etc.) are also now on Nebula. $15 USD per year right now. Apparently they don't have to worry so much about de-monetization, however that works.