One word: Whoa.
A wise reader of these ramblings recently stumbled onto a discovery that still has me doing a double-take. It’s a seemingly secret website that lets you watch any YouTube video ad-free anytime—without paying a dime.
It sounds too good to be true, I know—but get this: It’s actually an official Google-owned website. It just isn’t designed for public knowledge or meant to be used in quite this way, by regular ol’ YouTube-watchin’ schmoes like us.
But it works, all right. And while these sorts of discoveries usually stay within my private Intelligence Insider Community, where this treasure was initially noted, this one’s just too darn good not to share with all of y’all here in these broader waters.
After all, Cool Tools is all about off-the-beaten-path tech treasures that actually make an impact on our lives. And I honestly can’t even remember the last time I saw something as useful and experience-enhancing as this.
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Your YouTube ad-blasting adjustment
So here’s the deal:
➜ If you want to watch a YouTube video without any ads—even without a paid premium subscription—all you’ve gotta do is copy the link to the video and add in a single hyphen (-) between the “t” and “u” in YouTube.
So, for instance, you’d copy a link like this:
And you’d change it to this:
See the single hyphen between the “t” and “u”? That’s all there is to it.
⌚ And that’s literally all you’ve gotta do. We’re talkin’ 10 seconds of active effort here, between copying the link and adding in that hyphen, then opening it in whatever browser you want to use.
Making that change will instantly transport your video to the website youtube-nocookie.com—which sounds like a dessert-denying bummer on the surface (for anyone interested in snickerdoodle) but will actually pull up your video on that Google-owned, ad-free watching website we were just talking about.
☝️ The trick is that the site works only with direct and properly formatted links for specific videos. You can’t just go to it and search. But that hyphen-adding sorcery gets you to precisely the right place, so long as you start with a regular YouTube link for whatever video you want to watch.
💡 In case you’re curious, the site actually exists as a way for other websites to embed YouTube videos—having a relevant video appear within an article, for instance—without having ads on the page or YouTube-related cookies collected for all visitors who scroll by it.
Once you know this workaround, though, you can use it to your own advantage—and hopefully, if we’re lucky, Google won’t do anything to change that anytime soon.
- The ad-free YouTube workaround is entirely web-based, simply by adding a hyphen (-) between the “t” and the “u” in any regular YouTube video link—in any browser, on any device.
- It’s free to use.
- And you can use it even in an incognito browser window, where you aren’t signed into Google and no manner of data will be saved or associated with you.
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