Tired of ads showing up in between YouTube videos? Well, there exists a simple trick that can remove ads from YouTube videos and also, paywalls from popular websites. As pointed out by Redditor u/unicorn4sale on the r/webdev subreddit, it is as simple as adding a dot.
Yes, you read that right. You can bypass ads from YouTube without even using an ad-blocker with this trick. Though we don’t recommend using it extensively, here is how you can try it out before YouTube finds a potential fix to the trick.
All you have to do is add a dot (.) after the YouTube URL. For instance, if a typical URL looks like this – “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWNWGKCZl0U”, the modified one would be – “https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=sWNWGKCZl0U”. Look closely and you will see an extra dot after the “.com” in the URL.
“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,” explains the Redditor.
The Reddit user also points out that the trick works even in mobile browsers from the desktop version of the website. You can easily access the desktop version of websites through the “Request Desktop Site” feature in your browser.
But, while testing this workaround, Anmol from our team noticed that videos are not served (or saved to history) via your account. Instead, it’s a fresh YouTube session with no account logged in. This could be a huge hassle for users like me who want all viewed videos to stay in my history.
As part of its initial mitigation efforts, YouTube has already started redirecting users who visit “https://www.youtube.com./” to the regular “https://www.youtube.com/”. However, you can get around it if you turn off auto redirects from your browser settings. I know it may seem a lot of effort but who likes ads, right?
Now that the workaround has gained a lot of attention due to multiple media reports, we expect Google to fix this trick on YouTube in the coming weeks.
