This official Google workaround gives you ad-free YouTube anytime
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 You Tube 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’ You Tube-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. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v9D1nf1p_Y And you’d change it to this: https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=6v9D1nf1p_Y 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 in