While YouTube has gotten better at curating content for us over the years based on our viewing habits, it’s not nearly as good at curating as a human being.
Part of that is probably intentional to keep you clicking through to the largest video database on the internet. To block YouTube channels, you will need to play outside of YouTube’s rules and use a nifty third-party app to help you.
How to block YouTube video channels
Video Blocker for YouTube not only directly blocks channels but also gives you control over the types of channels that you can watch on YouTube in the future.
Here’s our guide on how to use it, as well as some other tips to prevent unwanted videos from showing up on your home page.
Pause watch history or use YouTube’s incognito mode
Introduced in 2018, YouTube’s ‘Incognito’ mode works on both smartphones and computers, but the method is slightly different for each.
Essentially, this feature will prevent YouTube from tracking what you watch, which in turn will prevent it from sending channels to your home screen.
To do this on a PC, click on the three-line menu icon in the upper left -> History. Then, on the right side, click on “Pause Watch History” and “Pause” again. You will need to return to this screen to reactivate your watch history.
On smartphones, click on your profile photo at the top right, then “Settings -> History & Privacy” and tap the “Pause watch history” slider.
Control what appears on your YouTube home page
First, the internal method of at least partially blocking YouTube videos is worth trying. Your YouTube home page shows all kinds of videos that you think interest you, from recent uploads on regularly visited channels to “recommended” videos based on your viewing habits.
To prevent videos from certain channels from appearing in your recommended feed, click the three-dot menu icon next to a video’s title on your YouTube home page (it is invisible until you hover over the right area) , then click “I’m not interested.
After that, you can choose various reasons why you are not interested in a video. If you select the “I don’t like video” option, the videos from this channel will no longer appear in your recommended feed.
Note that this does not prevent the channel from appearing in search results, only from your YouTube home page. If you want to directly block channels, you can go one step further.
Block channels by going to the About section
If you want to block a YouTube channel
- just go to the channel page and hit the About tab.
- Here you will find the “Flag” icon, which you must press to start the blocking process.
- After pressing the «Flag» icon, a drop-down list will appear, from which you must select the option «Block user.
- In particular, a warning message will appear explaining that blocking that particular YouTube channel will prevent them from commenting on any of your videos. Simply press the “Submit” button.
Block YouTube channel on mobile devices
If you want to block a YouTube channel from your mobile device, you need to search for that particular YouTube channel. Click on your “Profile”. Now, at the top right of the screen, tap on the three dots icon.
Now choose the “Block User” option from the drop-down menu that appears.
How to Block YouTube Channels with Video Blocker
On your desktop browser, you can take advantage of the Video Blocker extension forChromeandFirefoxto block videos and channels.
This extension allows you to completely block all videos from a specific channel or type of video and make them completely inaccessible as if they were never uploaded to YouTube. They will not appear as recommendations and even the channel name search will not show any results.
For demonstration purposes, we are using the extension in Chrome, although the same instructions will apply to Firefox as well.
The basic blocking process is simple: as soon as you see a video from a channel that you don’t like, right-click on it and select “Block videos from this channel.” You should do that. All videos on that channel will be immediately removed from your view.
However, when we tested this ourselves, the first time we tried to use the above method, it did not work for us.
An alternative method of using Video Blocker is to click the Video Blocker extension icon in Chrome and then “Block List.” Here you can manage all your blocked videos.
Go to “Add New” on the left panel to add channels to your block list manually. Once we did this for the first time, it seemed to unlock the right-click method that we described above.
Manage your block list
Once you’re in the Video Blocker menu, there are quite a few options you can dabble with. When adding a new video to block, for example, you will see three different options in the “Type” drop-down menu. This is what they mean.
- Channel Item – When this option is selected, you must enter the exact full name (case sensitive) of the channel where you want to block videos. It is good to copy or paste the channel name, but you can also type it yourself.
- Wildcard: This is the same as the “Channel Element” option, but is not case-sensitive. Any word entered here will be searched, and that channel will be blocked if the words match. Thus you can block multiple channels of the same type.
- Keyword:This option filters all videos that contain a specific keyword (not case sensitive). Just enter the keyword and Video Blocker will filter all the recommendations and searches that contain that word in any order.
You can also add a password to Video Blocker to prevent other users from adding or removing channels from the block list. However, this feature is not available in Firefox; you can only use it in Chrome.
Click on the Video Blocker extension icon and select “Options”.
In the Video Blocker menu, click on “Security” on the left panel and you will see the option to set your password. It should be noted that this will not prevent someone from removing the Video Blocker extension, but if they remove it, you will at least know that someone tried to view the content you blocked.
Besides protection, Video Blocker also allows you to export and import your block list so that you can use the extension on any PC without losing your block list.
Conclusion
Google isn’t making it easy for you to block YouTube channels and videos as they want you to watch as many videos as possible.
However, with the above methods, you will be able to block those videos that you are not interested in. Furthermore, you should also find out how to disable personalized ads on YouTube.