I hate ads with a passion. They have taken over the internet and pretty much any media service. Satellite TV (DStv) and terrestrial (eTV/SABC) are worse! When watching anything, you are constantly interrupted by ad breaks, or the screen shrinks to show ads. Radio too, I listen to PowerFM on my way to and from work, same story :(.

While I cannot do much for TV or Radio Ads, I found out I could get rid of them on websites. At first, it was the Ad Blocking plugins, but then I tend to use multiple browsers (dont ask why), so it becomes cumbersome. Also, it they become useless on mobile, where we are more likely to use custom apps instead of the browser.

A better solution for my home network, was to use Pi-hole for ‘Network wide ad blocking’. Pi-hole offers a lot of benefits, but for me the best is blocking ads across my home network.

In addition to blocking ads on websites, Pi-hole also blocks ads within apps! For example here are the screenshots of the EskomSePush app from my Home network and when using Mobile data:

Home Network	Mobile Network

Setting up the Pi-hole system is really easy (and absolutely worth it!). I purchased a Raspberry Pi and followed the steps on the Pi-hole website (https://pi-hole.net) and I was ready to go.

Purchasing Youtube Premium

I begrudgingly purchased Youtube Premium, but looking back, I think it is worth it. I have two boys who use Youtube a lot but because they do not just use Youtube at home, I needed a solution that would work away from home as well.

Premium comes with ad-free Youtube and ad-free Youtube Music, it made sense to subscribe for the service.

For the kids, there are two real benefits:

• Ad-free Youtube experience
• Offline videos (handy when travelling)

Two funny stories related to ads, one day my little Youtube addict cousin (4year old) kept mentioning to everyone that if you want to purchase a car, you need to go to ‘Autotrader’. Everyone kept ignoring him, thinking that perhaps he overhead someone talking about it. Turns out that he was seeing that Autotrader ad repeatedly while on Youtube.

Second story, my neighbours love playing music especially during weekends. Sometimes, when they are streaming on Youtube, you can hear the music being paused and then ads kicking in. What makes it worse is that nowadays people no longer carry music on flash drives, pretty much everyone is streaming on Youtube or Spotify. Sucks if you have to be interrupted by ads every now and again.