Right now, YouTube is the biggest platform where we can watch videos from our favourite creators and the company also pays them in order to make videos based on watch time and other metrics so that they also get compensated for creating content and making money out of it. The way in which YouTube pays its creators is based on the advertisement which is served to viewers watching videos on the platform. Now, this should tell you that ads are an integral part of YouTube and blocking ads means that the company earns less and eventually the creators suffer.
You must think you need an ad-blocker to skip ads on YouTube right? However, what if we tell you that there is an extremely simple, and we are not exaggerating, way in which you can block ads on YouTube. Yes, a redditor has found the simplest of ways to block ads on YouTube where you don’t have to install any adblocker or do anything else. Whilst this bug or trick allows you to skip ads, we advice you not to use it. Not watching ads means you aren’t supporting the creator who produces the videos. They put in endless amounts of efforts in producing their content, I am sure you can wait for a 5-20 second ad break before the content resumes.
With this method, you are definitely going to have your ads blocked on the platform which is YouTube but we found in our testing that you will be signed out of the website. So let’s get into the method which is simply placing a dot in the URL. For example, if you are visiting YouTube by writing the URL as “www.youtube.com” then to block ads, you just to have to add an extra “.” at the end which means your new URL will be “www.youtube.com.”
As we mentioned earlier, this method definitely works right now but we are sure that YouTube will work to fix this method as soon as possible. If you want to know why this works, there is a technical explanation as well.
The Redditor who found this trick says that “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”
Also, we have tested that the URL will remain as it is for the entire duration meaning that there is no need to keep changing the URL to add an extra dot. If you want to use this trick on mobile, you will have to browse YouTube from a browser and “request desktop site” and add the extra dot after “.com” at the end.
