Get Around Those YouTube Ads With a Simple Hack

Many folks hate ads and paywalls when they’re enjoying all the Internet has to offer. They install ad blockers or try complicated workarounds to get away from those annoyances. One Redditor, though, has found a hack that lets you get around those YouTube ads. Even without YouTube Premium, you can enjoy an ad-free experience.

Get Around Those YouTube Ads

All you have to do, it turns out, is add a single character to the end of the domain name for YouTube. So, rather than http://www.youtube.com, you’ll put it as http://www.youtube.com. instead. Put the rest of the URL as before.

That’s right, a simple period is all it takes to get around those YouTube ads. Also, once you’ve added that character to the URL, it will persist as you search or click on other videos.

The Hack Is Desktop-Only, but There’s (Another) Workaround

The trick seems to work mainly on the desktop, but there appears to be yet another workaround you can use from your iPhone device. If you use the “Request Desktop Site” option, the trick will work just fine.

Redditor u/unicorn4sale discovered this hack and posted it to r/webdev, adding:

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.

In other words, this trick won’t work forever, and there are other sites that are still vulnerable. We’ve found it to work for avoiding the paywall at The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. As word gets around, though, webmasters are sure to plug the hole.

Why You Might Want to Pretend You Never Read This Article

For the sake of ethical journalism, I do feel I should point out that sites like YouTube et al have advertisements and paywalls for a reason: hosting, creating, curating, and producing all of that content we love so much costs money. Ads and paywalls are what keep those site alive. If you worry that you might injure Google if you get around those YouTube ads, this article isn’t for you.

Then again, how much is someone like Google really going to miss out on if a few well-educated people bypass their means to profit?

Be sure you don’t miss our news that kids are spending almost as much time on TikTok as on YouTube.