YouTube is one of the most popular destinations on the web, and like so many sites out there, funds itself by displaying ads to viewers. While you could easily banish them by paying for YouTube Premium (or going all rogue with an ad-blocker), no workaround is quite as weirdly simple as this method discovered by — who else but a Redditor.

It turns out, getting rid of ads on YouTube videos is as simple as placing an extra period after the .com part of the YouTube URL. So instead of navigating to youtube.com/yourvideo, you would enter youtube.com./yourvideo in order to see this trick in action.

This is purportedly caused by a website like YouTube neglecting to normalize the hostname, causing the main content of the page to still be displayed while breaking a lot of other things, including advertisements. Because many websites serve their ads through a whitelist that does not contain the extra period, adding it onto the URL lets post content through but filters out advertisements.

Ads are everywhere, but what if you could disable them all this easily? Would it be unethical? Probably. Useful? Maybe. Regardless, I'm sure somebody's cooking up a Chrome extension that automatically adds the extra period onto YouTube links right about now.

Source: Reddit