I haven’t been willing to pay for YouTube’s premium service to avoid ads yet. I’ve mostly just put up with it, although I was extremely annoyed once when I was trying to follow a workout with some friends during shelter-in-place, and the ads kept interrupting our workout every few minutes.
A redditor found out you can bypass the ads by adding a period in the URL.
So, if the URL looks like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?[…]
You can add a period right after the end of youtube.com. The new URL would look like this:
https://www.youtube.com./watch?[…]
For it to work on mobile browsers, use the “Request Desktop Site” feature.
I also noticed that it doesn’t show that you’re logged into Google when using the non-ad URL, so it won’t track your watch history. And it doesn’t show the comments section either.
Apparently, this works for many news websites, as well, that are serving paywalls like: https://www.nytimes.com/section/world
Talk to me, Goose.