Most of us are not signed up for YouTube premium and with that, we get a lot of ads. Thankfully, over on Reddit someone has posted a simple way of watching YouTube videos in a web browser without any ads.

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Bypass YouTube Ads

So how does this work? Well, it’s simple. In the URL for whatever video you want to view, you just need to add an extra period after the dot com in the YouTube link. For example,

• Normal URL, normal ads
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
• Altered URL (note the bolded dot), little to no ads
  • https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

In addition to removing ads before the video, it also eliminates those ads in the middle as well. However, come to think of it, the time it takes to copy-paste and alter the video URL might just be the same as waiting for the “skip ad” button to appear. Unless you are watching like half an hour or hour-long video. Then this will be of great help.

Why does it work?

For those who are wondering why it works, here’s what Redditor unicorn4sale said when posting the trick:

It’s a commonly forgotten edge case. Websites forget to normalize the hostname, the content is still served, but there’s no hostname match on the browser so no cookies and broken CORS. Lots of bigger sites use a different domain to serve ads/media with a whitelist that doesn’t contain the extra dot

There’s a catch though. It has 4,000 upvotes on Reddit and it’s likely that YouTube already knows people have caught wind of this loophole. The oversight is probably going be corrected sooner rather than later. So enjoy it while it lasts.

Also, it’s important to note that the ad revenue partially helps your favourite creators keep doing what they do. Ad blockers and this trick take away those resources. Sorry for guilt-tripping you but that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.