Skip YouTube ads and paywalls with just a dot

YouTube ads can get quite annoying, and I guess that they are designed like that to try and encourage you to get YouTube Premium. You can say “not today” to YouTube for a while more as Redditor unicorn4sale has found a pretty simple little trick to bypass YouTube ads as well as paywalls on certain websites. All you need to do is to add a dot to the URL. I really wasn’t clickbaiting you guys.

Instead of typing in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbd-QxN4QSs, to take advantage of this trick you will instead type in https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=Pbd-QxN4QSs. It is really that simple.

Apparently what happens is “websites will forget to normalize the hostname and still serve the content, but there’s no hostname match on the browser so no cookies and broken CORS”. This trick even works on mobile browsers apparently, although I am pretty sure a lot of people don’t enjoy watching YouTube in their mobile browsers, considering the amount of people fussing about being unable to install the YouTube app to watch videos on their non-GMS smartphones.

Paywalls on certain websites can also be bypassed, with the Redditor managing to get past the paywall on New York Times. This trick might get patched out pretty soon, but for now, enjoy your ad-free YouTube without having to pay for YouTube Premium for a bit longer.

Pokdepinion: Ads are a good way to support the content creator, but sometimes ads can get really annoying when they pop up in the middle of the video… I guess video platforms still have to finetune how they deliver the ads.