Here's How You Can Remove Those YouTube Video Ads Easily

Everyone who's watched a video on YouTube will have likely encountered an ad or two during their video session. Some might find such ads interesting and even fun to watch. Many, however, might find these ads pretty annoying.

A web developer who goes by the name unicorn4sale on Reddit recently discovered a simple trick that will either lessen the amount of ads shown on YouTube, or remove them entirely. The trick requires users to do a very easy task, but results in an ad-free viewing experience.

All that a YouTube viewer needs to do is to add a dot or period (“.”) to the website's URL.

It's that easy?

The web developer said people can simply “bypass youtube ads by adding a dot after the domain.” This translates to adding a dot right after “youtube.com” just before the slash (“/”).

The developer then provided examples: two links to a video titled “Crazy Oreo Flavors.” The first link has some ads, while the second link has no ads.

unicorn4sale added that the trick also works on websites that serve paywalls, which require users to subscribe or pay a subscription fee in order to access the content. One example is that of an article about the late George Floyd, written by the New York Times.

How does it work?

The web developer explained that the trick works because websites continue to load even if the additional dot is included in the URL. In the developer's own words,

“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 - and lots of bigger sites use a different domain to serve ads/media with a whitelist that doesn't contain the extra dot.“

Funding

9To5Google advises netizens to be responsible in using the trick to bypass ads on their favorite videos. Ads help fund creators and journalists so they can continue creating the videos they upload to the platform for everyone's delight. By removing ads this way, popular creators' salaries could be affected. If their funding is affected, their content might be affected in the long run as well.