Unicorn4sale on Reddit a weird but easy way to bypass advertisements when you’re watching YouTube videos. In the video’s URL, add an extra period after the dot com.
For example, here’s an example of a link that will occasionally show ads:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkUu6hg-GeE
And here’s an example of the same link that will not show ads:
https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=NkUu6hg-GeE
What some people would normally do (certainly not me) to bypass the advertisements is to add the AdBlock extension. However, while the extension works for regular browser windows, it doesn’t really help you if you’re going in incognito mode. For incognito mode, adding the simple punctuation lets me watch a YouTube video without any ads.
“It’s a commonly forgotten edge case, websites forget to normalise 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,” wrote unicorn4sale.
The Reddit user also mentioned that the same trick can be used for many other sites like the New York Times. I also found that once I added the period after the dot com and clicked to another video or page, the period would still be there. This means that I won’t need to keep re-adding the period everytime I click through to another link in the same website.
This trick on Reddit current has over 4800 upvotes, and over 450 comments. It’s likely that this hack would eventually catch on and YouTube, as well as other sites, would correct this flaw soon.
It’s still important to note that ad revenue on the pages of your favourite content creators (including us!) keep them afloat so creators can keep making things you love. We can’t stop you from taking this trick for a cheeky test run, but try to go without it.
