How many videos do you get when you open the YouTube homepage on your device? When I do open YouTube in any browser I get zero, because I have turned off the YouTube history and Google decided it would push users into signing in to an account by disabling the generic feed of videos that it was showing previously to anonymous users.
However, even if you sign in, your mileage may vary depending on device, application and the screen of the device. It is clear that Google seems to be interested in showing less and less videos on the homepage of YouTube.
Turns out, someone predicted that this would happen in early 2025 already, stating back then that YouTube would soon — in the same year — display just a single video on its homepage on his main device, a 32″ 1440p display.
Back in early 2025, YouTube showed five videos and a big ad on the homepage, a stark contrast to the 30 videos and zero ads that YouTube showed back in 2019.
When the same author opened YouTube this month on Apple TV, he was greeted with a layout that showed just two thumbnails, one of them being an ad.
So, just one video remained on the homescreen as predicted. Here is where it gets crazy: he is now predicting that Google won’t show a single video going forward on YouTube’s above the fold homepage (but likely a big ad for something).
The approach is similar to how Google turned Google Search into a vessel for delivering ads to visitors rather than sites. For some queries at least, Google shows zero organic links above the fold. Only ads, lots of them. The first organic result may show up on the second page.
Any other website would get penalized into oblivion by Google for doing so, but the same rules that Google applies to websites don’t apply to Google itself.
I’m less and less interested in YouTube because of Google’s stance of making the live of users who are not signed in miserable.
Anyway, what is your take on this and more importantly, how many ads and videos do you see on the YouTube homepage currently?
Like replacing the funnel with a spoon to force-feed the goose…
No YouTube account, no Google account. YouTube videos are always played embedded.
Side-note: @Martin, your rhetoric, style, words in this article seem different from the ones I know after having read your articles here and on Ghacks for years and years. If I didn’t have the habit of replacing certitudes with doubts I could have swore an alter alter ego had been typing 🙂
It’s so satisfying to stick it to the man I don’t even care about the 6-7 seconds delay in FreeTube on my computer, or the even slower performance with Firefox and uBlock Origin. The main thing is that Google doesn’t get anything from my visit. NewPipe and all its forks works beautifully, the ultimate “f*ck you” app if you ask me. On Reddit there’s also a real revolution brewing with countless “degoogled my life”-posts every day and in close relation to that “ditched Windows”-posts as well, showing that there’s a very strong resistance against the advertising Hell that is forced upon us all. One video or no video on a frontpage, or forced slowdowns mean nothing in this battle. This is war.
I see zero YouTube ads/videos/anything… using Firefox with uBO and LibRedirect extensions. The latter automatically converts YouTube clicks into crap-free Invidious links.
@Tom Hawack, yes, I see what you mean about the style, hope that doesn’t mean what I think it does.
@gorch, same here except I use the Alter extension rather than LibRedirect. But the result is the same and vids load in yewtube with the option to switch to 5 alternatives if that doesn’t work.