On Monday night, during How to Teach With Video, someone asked, “what do you do about all the yucky ads on YouTube?” A couple of members of the class suggested ad blocker extensions. I suggested trying Quietube.

Quietube is a convenient tool that you can add to your browser’s bookmarks bar. Quietube will remove all the clutter from YouTube allowing you to view only your selected video. Quietube removes all advertising, sidebar content, comments, and ratings. Installing Quietube requires nothing more than dragging the Quietube button to your toolbar. Then anytime that you’re on YouTube click the Quietube button to remove all of the clutter and just watch your selected video.

Other methods for watching videos without sidebar content.
View Pure is a useful site that strips way all of the distractions of related videos, comments, and promoted videos. To use View Pure just copy the link of a video into the “purifier” on the View Pure website and then click purify. Your “purified” video will be displayed on a blank white background. You can also install the View Pure bookmarklet to accomplish the same goal. 

Watchkin is a service that allows you to watch and project YouTube videos without seeing the related sidebar content typically seen on YouTube.com. Watchkin can be used in a few ways. You can enter the direct URL of a video into Watchkin to have the sidebar content removed. You can search for videos through Watchkin and have family-friendly results displayed (if a video appears that is not family-friendly Watchkin has a mechanism for flagging it as inappropriate). Watchkin also offers a browser bookmarklet tool that you can click while on YouTube.com to have the related content disappear from the page.