YouTube is running an experimental version of the site free of any ad

Aug 21, 2013 19:11 GMT  ·  By

Google has been pushing for more ads in YouTube, partly because running the world's largest video site is not cheap, but also because Google likes money. The company tries to make the ads relevant and they're usually not that intrusive, as even the pre-roll ads can be skipped.

Still, some people don't like and don't want any ads in their internet. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools for them, countless ad blockers are available for all browsers, even mobile ones.

But if it's just the YouTube ads you want to get rid of, there's a very interesting experiment being carried out and you can trick the site into joining in.

The experiment gets rid of all the ads on the video site. To enable it in your browsers, all you have to do is make some changes to the site's cookies, which is easier than it sounds.

All you have to do is open a developer console in your browser and paste the code below. In Chrome, Opera (both 15+ and 12) and Firefox, Ctrl+Shift+I opens up the dev tools. Once there, select the Console tab. Ctrl+Shift+J takes you straight to the console in Chrome/Opera and Ctrl+Shift+J does the same in Firefox.

In Internet Explorer, press F12 and select Console. In Safari, you first have to enable the dev tools.

Finally, once you have a console open, just paste the code:

code
document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=oKckVSqvaGw; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();
To revert to the regular YouTube, with ads, retrace the steps above but paste the following code:
code
document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();
Since this is an experiment carried by YouTube itself, you can expect it to stop working at some point in the future. And, of course, this is hardly the simplest or the most reliable way to block ads on YouTube. But it's certainly one of the more interesting ones.