Block YouTube Ads With One Click
One of the most frustrating things to deal with on the internet is the small (or even not so small) video ads that pop up in front of the YouTube videos you try to drink. While most of them allow you to jump to the video in a few seconds, this ad-filled pause can feel like an eternity. We have a trick to fix this, and it’s ingenious.
All you have to do to remove these promotional videos – a trick we tested today when we wrote this article, but which Google will definitely fix at some point – is to put a period after the YouTube domain in the URL. That’s all.
So if your url looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?[...]
You will want to add a dot right after youtube.com ends. So your new url will look like this: https://www.youtube.com./watch?[...]
As I said, I just tested this trick on a random video that triggered a video ad every time I ran it in a new browser. Placing a dot after “.com” did not bring up ads, no matter how many times I tried. Removing this period and returning to the normal URL returned the ad.
This trick only works on the desktop version of YouTube , so you’ll have to request that version of the site in your mobile browser if you’re trying to watch videos on your phone. In addition, “intermittent hacking” is great for those one-off moments when you try to watch a YouTube video and find yourself getting bogged down or annoyed by ads. However, this is not ideal if you are planning a long YouTube binge watching session.
In this case, you can put a period after the “.com” in the YouTube URL as long as you like, but the URL will revert to the default YouTube link whenever you click on a new piece of content.
Continuously adding a dot to the URL to cancel video ads will be just as annoying and time-consuming as watching the ad itself. If you are looking for YouTube without advertising, whenever you are on the site, you may want to combine a few of your favorite Ad-blocking software with a browser extension on YouTube, is also working to remove the pre-video ads. I’m a fan ofYouTube Enhancer that works well and has a pretty handy config screen:
There are many such extensions out there, but I’ve always preferred the simplicity of YouTube’s Enhancer. In addition, it is less likely that my data will be pumped or not known what, given that the extension was developed by one easily recognizable person . I may be overly suspicious, but I tend to be mistaken that fewer extensions have access to what I do on the web than more.