One of the most annoying issue with YouTube is the ‘sudden’ popup AdSense ads that appear while the video is playing. But there is no official procedure to disable, block or remove AdSense ads from YouTube videos, unless they are your own YouTube videos, because this is the only way Google makes the revenue from YouTube.
Tip: The AdSense ads on YouTube videos are not randomly displayed ‘suddenly’. They appear at the time when you see the small yellow point in the video progress bar. See the image above for details. If there are multiple yellow points on the progress bar of your videos, then it means the ad will be displayed multiple times.
You can click on the small cross sign to close the ad every time it is displayed, but the interruption is very inconvenient. Since there is no setting in YouTube that will let you disable, block or remove YouTube ads, the only way to do this is to use a browser extension that block those ads automatically. Adblock Plus does exactly that.
Adblock Plus is a browser extension or add-on available for almost every available browser including Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera. Go to the official page of Adblock Plus and install an appropriate version for your browser, and then configure the filters in it as needed. Also, instead of adding filters manually, you can simply use one of the popular ad blocking lists from here to automatically configure filters.
Once done, you will not see any AdSense ads on YouTube videos anymore.
Note that once you have installed Adblock Plus, it will not only remove ads from YouTube, but from all the websites you visit. Fortunately, Adblock Plus also lets you view ads on specific websites. To disable Adblock Plus on a specific website, open that website in your web browser and click on the Adblock Plus icon in the toolbar. In the drop down menu, select Disable on thiswebsite.com.
Why view Ads on any website? Since Google AdSense is a contextual advertising network, it displays ads that are highly relevant to you based on the content you are searching on Google or reading on other websites. So you may want to actually see the AdSense ads on some websites if you are looking for a quick fix for the issue at hand as the fix may be there is the ads. Also, there are many websites that depend solely on the advertising revenue. You may want to support those sites by viewing their ads.
Update: Adblock Plus is the only available working browser extension that lets you remove, block and disable ads permanently from YouTube. Other extensions such as TubeStop and AdBlock are no longer working, so they’re removed from this page.