This Simple Trick Allows YouTube Watching Without Ads

Watching or looking at ads is a part of the internet, whether you like it or not. It’s how all of this (often) free content is paid for. But look, we get it that you might not always want to see a 15-second ad before that YouTube video or maybe you ran through your number of free reads at that news outlet that has a paywall. With the simplest trick ever, you can bypass ads, at least until everyone figures out a way to patches it.

Discovered by the r/webdev subreddit, selectively tossing a period into a URL can fool some websites and YouTube into letting you view content without seeing ads. It has to do with content and ad hosting – and I’m no web developer so I’m not about to try and explain it – but it works like this.

YouTube No Ads Trick

• If you go to our newest video on the Android 11 Beta and aren’t a YouTube Premium subscriber, you’ll like see an ad:
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sEJUdytWFg
• But if you go to this version of the URL, where we put a period just after the .com, you shouldn’t see any:
• https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=-sEJUdytWFg

See that? It’s crazy simple and should work on both mobile and desktop, though you may have to force the desktop mode when on mobile to get it to work. And again, you may even find (for now) that it works on sites that have a paywall, depending on how their ad system is setup with their site.

So yeah, toss a period after .com and you might get YouTube and other websites with no ads.

// reddit