Last Updated on January 7, 2023 by Mathew Diekhake
YT5s.com is a real website that allows you to download YouTube videos onto your computer’s hard drive so you can keep them. The site is extremely similar to YT1s.com which we already reviewed. The names suggest they may be owned by the same people. If you’re visiting this website yourself, though its ethics may be in question, you don’t have to worry about a virus at this time. If the site was compromised at one time, it isn’t anymore at the time of writing this post. And the site is not owned by people who compromise it on purpose from what we can see. We have browsed YT5s.com with the Malwarebytes Browser Guard and the domain wasn’t compromised or malicious. They’re getting millions of monthly views from real people who appreciate the site’s existence.
However, if you find your browser being redirected to the YT5s.com domain, it means someone has set up a browser hijacker and you have that browser hijacker on your computer which is causing the redirect. Browser hijackers are a form of malware and should be removed as soon as you notice them. The way to remove a browser hijacker is with a reliable antimalware tool that is made for your operating system. Sometimes you can use adware removal tools as well. If you are being redirected to the YT5s.com domain, you can use any reliable antimalware tool to remove it. We recommend Spybot – Search & Destroy for Windows users. If you use macOS, we recommend Malwarebytes.
It should be noted that the safety of websites is subject to change. With a domain like YT5s.com, it can’t sign up to the best advertising networks to make money because it won’t be accepted by the network because of the type of site it is. The best ad networks typically wouldn’t want to advocate such sites existing so they wouldn’t be able to sign up for the networks. That means they have to search for ad revenue from other places and this is where sometimes a webmaster may accidentally sign up for ad networks that are low quality. The web admin may do this without realizing it or on purpose [because they felt they had no other way to make a profit]. But as mentioned, at the time of writing this post, we don’t detect any malware on the domain.
In conclusion, we can see some of our competitors suggesting YT5s.com is a rogue website displaying untrustworthy ads, but we didn’t find any during our time of visit. The YT5s.com domain looks safe to visit in our opinion, though whether it’s legal to use is another matter. If your browser is automatically redirected to the YT5s.com domain, it’s because there is a browser hijacker on your computer that needs to be removed.
January 7, 2023 @ 04:24
I have visited YT5s.com with my Adblock off and it has some small ads. I couldn’t identify the ad network but the ads seemed OK. They are small but there is also an ad overlay that forces you to click on it before it can be removed. In general ads that force a click to remove them are low quality. That being said, even Google has similar ads to this nowadays, so if Google can do it then there is no reason another ad network can’t do it. As a matter of fact, Google’s ad overlays are even worse now that I think about it. They take up the whole screen and show an even larger ad. Nothing on the internet should force you to make a click just to get through it. That’s the definition of a low-quality web experience.
January 6, 2023 @ 20:50
If you are downloading YouTube videos to store on your hard drive, as you might imagine, no one else is likely to know. However, if you are downloading them because you want to re-upload them onto another YouTube channel, we suggest you don’t do that as it is against YouTube’s terms of service and the owners have the right to file a copyright complaint about it. We strongly recommend you don’t try to monetize stolen videos from other YouTube channels as this is a serious offense.