The rise in generative AI technology has made scamming people online much easier, with fake versions of Tom Hanks, Mr. Beast, and other celebrities often appearing in online ads. YouTube still has a problem with fraudulent advertisements, as I've learned from my own YouTube feed over the past few months.
You can set custom DNS to block ads and whatnot on androids and most smart TVs AFAIK. It should just be a setting somewhere. I use
base.dns.mullvad.net
For TV you might need IP address in which case it’s 194.242.2.4.
Source and more info about this here: https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
This doesn’t work for most streaming services. The ads and the actual video come from the same server. I know this is the case on Hulu (probably YouTube, too).
Yeah, it used to not be like this but they have taken measures to not use separate domains to serve ads because of dns filters.
Yeah it doesn’t block YouTube ads, because YouTube hosts the ads locally. No reason to have the ad provider host their own, when YT already has the infrastructure built to host them. Trying to use DNS to block YT ads would also block the videos themselves, which sort of defeats the entire purpose of using the site.