So I’m a bit new to the homenetworking and homelab situation but I have a Unifi DM-SE as my router and I’m trying to establish the best way to block ads at home and away.
So I am currently primarily using either extensions or content blocking apps on my devices to block ads but I’ve been looking into DNS based solutions lately.
I’ve looked into setting up PiHole and it looks pretty simple to do and I have a dedicated small computer with Proxmox that I use for things like Homebridge, Scrypted and I think could set it up easily on there. But it looks like it only works at home. A lot of people say you can set up a VPN but I’d rather not have to turn on and off my VPN on my phone whenever I leave home.
I also looked into Next DNS which seems also pretty easy to setup, but I couldn’t tell if it’s better to set this up per device or network wide via my router.
There’s also the extensions and content blocking apps which would be device specific.
Which is the fastest, performance wise, and easiest to interact with daily?
That’s not possible. Your friends have to pay or watch ads themselves.
If it were possible for some people to pay and others not to pay, then YouTube would have survived for over a decade, including periods of profitability, even though some people blocked ads. Oh wait…
It’s definitely not because YouTube has 2 billion viewers and expanded to all regions of the world, and there only real way to increase revenue is to squeeze the existing customers.
Sounds like I do have to remove them. I’ve had the family plan since it was Google Play Music, and at that time it was permitted/quazi-encourage to make a family plan, a family and friends plan. It doesn’t change the economics vastly for any of us, but you’ve made me re-read the terms for a service. A family plan still ends up cheaper than two individual plans, and that was the basis for it in the first place.
To your other point, Alphabet/Google is profitable overall. YouTube is not, and never has been. If it was, they’d be on the quarterly earnings calls bragging it up and trying to pump the shit out of it. That doesn’t happen. The sudden surge of all the AD supported platforms trying to find any cash they can isn’t 100% because they’re just greedy. It’s because they aren’t sustainable how they operate now. That compounded with the fact that borrowing money is expensive again, they actually need to have positive revenue to survive.
While I don’t like Elon or Twitter, the public dumpster fire it is gave us a bit of a look at how much money these platforms bleed. Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, et al. don’t make money, they bleed it, but cheap borrowing rates made it easy to keep them afloat on the promise they’d make money eventually. We just reached the point where eventually needs to be now for them to survive.