YouTube URL Bug Lets You Watch Videos Without Ads

The chances are that many of you reading this probably really enjoy YouTube as a form of ‘free’ entertainment, but likely not so much the masses of adverts that have grown increasingly on the platform over the last few years. While many have resorted to ‘ad-blockers’ as a means of bypassing them, it seems that a simple tweak of the URL might also give you some pretty nice results!

Ad-Less YouTube – Thanks to a URL Oversight!

In a report via TheNextWeb, it has been found that a moderate oversight in the URL coding for the video platform can allow you to bypass the need to watch adverts. So, how does it work? Well, it all boils down to how you enter the web address:

For example, let’s say that video you’re watching has the web address – ‘youtube.com/genericchannel’. With this URL, adverts will pop up as normal. Changing it to ‘youtube.com./genericchannel’, however, will stop adverts being played entirely. And for those of you who didn’t spot the difference, there’s a singular additional of a period mark.

Enjoy it While You Can!

Spotted by Reddit user ‘Unicorn4sale‘ they have said:

“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.”

Enjoy it while you can though, because the chances are that when YouTube discovers this (which may already be the case by the time you’re reading this) this moderate oversight will have probably already been fixed!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!