A Redditor found a way to remove YouTube ads. (Image: Bloomberg)
YouTube is one of the most popular places to watch videos on the web and on your mobile device. The Google-owned platform funds itself by displaying ads to viewers, but there are ways to get rid of them either by paying for the YouTube Premium or going rogue with an ad-blocker. However, a Reddit user has found a trick to stop ads from displaying on YouTube that could not be any simpler.
Trick to stop ads on YouTube
It turns out that getting rid of YouTube ads is as simple as placing an extra dot after the .com part of the YouTube URL. “You can bypass YouTube ads by adding a dot after the domain,” the Reddit user unicorn4sale wrote.
Instead of navigating to youtube.com/video, the Redditor asks to navigate to youtube.com./video in order to see the content without ads. The post has now 5000 upvotes on Reddit and it was first spotted by Android Police.
Also works on mobile
Redditor also followed up the post with a confirmation that the trick also works on mobile. “I had initially assumed that it didn’t work on mobile because the browsers normalised the URL, however, this isn’t the case,” Reddit user said, adding that the redirection happens on the server-side, so the trick also works on mobile browsers. All you have to do is to use the “Request Desktop Site” feature.
Why this trick works
The Redditor explains that the reason this trick is working is probably due to websites like YouTube not normalising the hostname. It causes the main content of the page to still be displayed while breaking a lot of other things, including advertisements. Since a lot of websites serve their ads through a whitelist that does not contain the extra dot, adding it onto the URL lets you see the content minus the ads.
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Since the post has already become popular, it is highly likely that YouTube now knows about it and would have been working on a fix. So, while the trick is working as of now, it might not be around for too long.