Eliminating advertisements in YouTube videos

 YouTube is a great site. It includes an amazing collection of educational and entertaining content. The only problem is that most videos have annoying advertisements. Google realise that these ads are annoying so they offer the possibility of signing up for a premium account, but since the cost of such an account can be over 150 euros per year most people decide to tolerate the ads.

Luckily one of my students told me about a free hack to eliminate advertisements for free. When you play a video on YouTube you will see that the URL is something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXX where XXX is the unique ID of the video you are watching. If you alter the URL to insert a minus sign - between the t and u in youtube you will be brought to an ad free version of the same video (e.g. https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=XXX)

Like all hacks, there are limitations.

1. Sometimes when you try to load a video from yout-ube.com for the first time you will get an error message "cannot locate video". I am not 100% certain why this error occurs. It is probably somehing to do with content caching. However, simply prerssing the "reload" button in your browser (or type ctrl/cmd-R) will solve the problem.
2. When using this service the video will occupy the full screen and so you won't be able to see the "related videos" that you see when you visit the normal YouTube site. Many people will consider this an advantage.

Don't ask me how this works behind the scenes. All I know is the description from their website, but this describes how to use the service rather than describing what happens under the covers. However, I am sorry to say that the site will probably stop working once Google figure out how to block it - there is too much revenue at stake for them.