How to remove ads from sites like YouTube

A web developer has spotted and shared an interesting trick that can remove many ads from sites like YouTube and bypass paywalls for publications.

Before we dive in, it’s important to remember that ads, especially on sites like YouTube, are what help fund your favorite creators and journalists to continue creating and writing the content you love. With that in mind, use the trick below responsibly.

Earlier this week, over on Reddit, web developer unicorn4sale shared an interesting and frequently forgotten bit of how the internet works. While we typically look at urls as using dots solely to divide the domain name — separating “youtube” and “com”, for example — it’s perfectly valid to include an additional dot at the end of the domain name. As this fact is not widely known, many web developers do not account for it, leading to particularly interesting results.

If you add the extra dot to a YouTube video URL, as seen below, you’ll find that YouTube’s pre-video ads generally no longer play. In our own testing, the effect isn’t quite perfect with YouTube, sometimes returning an odd static image ad instead of a video ad. For websites including that of the New York Times, adding the extra dot will bypass the usual paywall/login block.

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Simple trick discovered to remove ads from sites like YouTube and more