Block YouTube Ads with One Small Workaround

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.

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