Reddit user discovers simple URL trick to remove ads from videos on YouTube

YouTube has the biggest library of audio and visual content on the planet. Like so many sites, YouTube is self-funded by displaying third-party ads to viewers. While a paid YouTube Premium membership is a workaround, a Reddit user has found a much simpler solution.

According to a Redditor (First spotted by Android Police), all you need to do is add an extra period after the dot com in the YouTube link of the video you are watching. So instead of navigating to youtube.com/yourvideo, you would enter youtube.com./yourvideo in order to see this trick in action.

The user explains that this method works because several websites forget to “normalise the hostname”. Here is what Reddit user unicorn4sale had to say when posting the trick; “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.”

At the time of writing, the post had 4.8K upvotes on Reddit, so it is safe to assume that YouTube is aware of the development. The oversight will likely be corrected soon. So you should probably enjoy this hack for the little time it is available. If you want to enjoy ad-free content on the platform, you can use a YouTube Premium subscription, which costs Rs 169 per month in India and also gives you access to YouTube Originals.