View YouTube Videos With YouTube's IP Address

When you can't access the YouTube website, use its IP address

By
Bradley Mitchell
Bradley Mitchell
Writer
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • University of Illinois
An MIT graduate who brings years of technical experience to articles on SEO, computers, and wireless networking.
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Updated on January 16, 2022
Reviewed by
Jessica Kormos
Jessica Kormos
Reviewed by Jessica Kormos
  • Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College
Jessica Kormos is a writer and editor with 15 years' experience writing articles, copy, and UX content for Tecca.com, Rosenfeld Media, and many others.
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What to Know

  • You can use an IP address to reach the URL www.youtube.com, but it doesn't always work.
  • The most common YouTube IP addresses are 208.65.153.238, 208.65.153.251, 208.65.153.253, and 208.117.236.69.
  • Using a website's IP address could violate your host network's acceptable use policy (AUP) if it's blocking that site.

This article explains how to use an IP address to reach the www.youtube.com URL. Like many popular websites, YouTube uses multiple servers to handle incoming requests. This means the YouTube domain has more than one IP address available depending on when and where you connect.

YouTube IP Addresses

These are the most common IP addresses for YouTube:

  • 208.65.153.238
  • 208.65.153.251
  • 208.65.153.253
  • 208.117.236.69

Just as you can visit the YouTube homepage by entering https://www.youtube.com/ in a web browser, so also can you add https:// to any YouTube IP address, for example, https://208.65.153.238/.

If you open YouTube from its IP address because it's blocked where you are, use an anonymous web proxy server or VPN service to open YouTube.

Person entering the IP address of YouTube
Michela Buttignol / Lifewire 

If you can't open YouTube with its IP address, see the section at the bottom of this page for more information.

YouTube IP Address Ranges

To support a large and growing network of web servers, YouTube owns a number of IP addresses in ranges called blocks.

These IP address blocks belong to YouTube:

  • 199.223.232.0 - 199.223.239.255
  • 207.223.160.0 - 207.223.175.255
  • 208.65.152.0 - 208.65.155.255
  • 208.117.224.0 - 208.117.255.255
  • 209.85.128.0 - 209.85.255.255
  • 216.58.192.0 - 216.58.223.255
  • 216.239.32.0 - 216.239.63.255

Administrators who want to block access to YouTube from their network should block these IP address ranges if their router allows.

In a famous incident in 2008, the Pakistan national internet service provider Pakistani Telecom implemented a block on YouTube that was broadcast to other parts of the internet, effectively making YouTube unreachable anywhere for a few hours.

Acceptable Uses of YouTube IP Addresses

If you cannot reach https://www.youtube.com/, your web host might be blocking access to it. In this case, using an IP address-based URL can succeed yet violate your host network's acceptable use policy (AUP). Check your AUP or contact your local network administrator before using an IP address to connect to YouTube.

Some countries have banned access to YouTube. Whether using its name or IP address, people in these countries should expect their connections to fail. This is a prime reason to use an HTTP proxy or VPN service.

It's difficult for a website like YouTube to ban individual users by their public IP address because most internet providers allocate these to customers dynamically (these IP addresses often change). For the same reason, YouTube does not strictly limit voting on videos to one vote per IP address, although it does keep other restrictions in place to prevent vote stuffing.

Find the IP Addresses of YouTube Users

Users who vote on videos or post comments to the site have their IP addresses recorded by YouTube. Like other large websites, YouTube might be requested to share its server logs with legal agencies under court order.

You, as a regular user, however, cannot access these private IP addresses.

This Doesn't Always Work

Some IP addresses that are marked as belonging to YouTube point to another Google product like Google Search at google.com. This is due to shared hosting. Google uses some of the same servers to deliver its products, including YouTube. 

Sometimes a general IP address used by a Google product isn't enough information to explain which web page it is that you're trying to visit, and so you might not get anywhere useful and could see a blank page or some sort of error.

This concept applies to any web page. If you can't open a website using its IP address, then there's a chance that the address is to a server that hosts more than one website, and the server, therefore, doesn't know which website to load upon your request.

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