[snailmailman]

I used to run YouTube with “ad targeting” turned off. The ads were 100% scams. Lots of AI slop. Deepfakes of celebrities pitching all sorts of scams. Lots of nsfw products and even occasionally illegal things like drugs or guns. Also lots of ads in languages I do not speak.

I recently learned that if you turn on ad targeting you can block certain ads and never see them again. So I’ve turned it on just to block the worst of the ads. But googles ad targeting still can’t target ads to me. It’s maybe only 70% scams now. But their targeting still sucks and I still get ads in foreign languages that I do not speak.

On my desktop I just use Adblock. I really try to avoid YouTube on mobile at all costs because the ads make it completely unusable.

[WarmWash]

Most ad blockers, like ublock, also block trackers. Ublock definitely blocks Google's tracking

[andrepd]

Try newpipe to use YouTube without ads.

[wishfish]

On iOS, uBlock Lite works great on Youtube. Same for Firefox + uBlock on Android. You can skip the ads on mobile.