This one little trick will remove ads from any YouTube videos you watch

This will even work with some paywalled sites.

by
Kevin Raposo
June 12, 2020

Image: Unsplash

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You’d be hardpressed to go to a day without seeing an ad on the internet. They are everywhere, and while they are necessary, sometimes they can be too much. Take YouTube, for example. Ads have been a part of the platform for what seems like forever, but sometimes they are way, way too intense.

For the most part, they are tolerable, but if you are in a hurry and just need information now they can be a huge pain as you wade through two or more 30-second ad on something you really don’t care about. Well, if you find yourself in that situation and don’t feel like dealing with an adblocker, there’s one simple trick that works for any YouTube video, and even some sites that are behind a paywall.

First shown on Reddit by u/unicorn4sale, this trick involves the humble period. All you have to do is add a period after “.com” and before the video URL. This is how it will look in your address bar:

Image: KnowTechie

This trick works on both web and mobile (if you are viewing YouTube through its desktop version) and will even persist throughout your YouTube session. You can go to other videos and the period with remain.

According to the Reddit thread, it will also remove ads from some websites and can even circumnavigate some paywalls. The thread also goes into why this works, noting, “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.”

Now, it should be noted that Google will probably be on this with the quickness and its’ quite possible this trick will not work in the future.

What do you think? Could you see yourself using this trick to bypass YouTube ads? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.