so we already know that youtube doesn’t like people freeloading their bandwidth using something like invidious, piped, newpipe etc. why don’t they just close the public web api and require a login or something. by requiring login they can keep track of what users are watching and if a user is watching thousands of videos daily they can rate limit that user.
are they afraid of losing their user if they do so? I personally don’t think it can affect their business or profit. It will cut down their cost of bandwidth and computation costs. so why don’t just cut off users that don’t bring any revenue??
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Projects using YouTube API have to agree to ToS. That’s why Google want them to use API instead of web scraping.
I haven’t seen anyone mention it yet, but a reason might be that providing an API is cheaper than web scraping.
If people really want access to your data, they can just scrape your website, but that requires loading all the data through the website itself which requires loading millions or billions of video thumbnails, comments, descriptions, recommendations, etc. It’s much cheaper for them to send a JSON through an API, even though they might know that some people are trying to undermine them by using that data to circumvent their advertising.
Sure, but If they start requiring a login to watch video all the privacy frontend of YouTube will die since they will be able to apply rate limit to individual users easily. right now all they can do is shadow ban the IP of invidious instance temporary.
If they start requiring a login, YouTube is dead. The accessibility is what makes it popular.
I really don’t think requiring login will kill YouTube. only the privacy conscious people will leave but majority of people won’t even notice.
It might.
YouTube’s business case is that it is the easiest to access video platform and pays out the most to content creators. Adding a login wall may be enough to allow a competitor to come in and compete against that, especially given how YouTube videos are embedded on other websites.
Yeah, youtube is pretty much unusable without login in due to all the shitty videos recommended by default.
Reddit did that and then instantly multiple serious competitors began to siphon off their power users both out of principle and practicality, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
YouTube i think understands to not cross the line because if they no longer have a monopoly on mid to long form content their golden goose dies. People are already on edge after a long sequence of attacks against non-premium users.
Personally, If they do do that, and at least some amount of the channels I care about move to a different platform, I’ll happily move with them and cancel my YouTube premium.
That’s probably true for now. Killing the API would be too much of a shock to millions of people, which would obviously hurt business.
However, making small changes every year is more acceptable. Remember how ads were initially rolled out vs. what they are today? At first, it was just an ad banner below the video, and I was willing to quit YT then and there. Well, turns out ad blockers handled that, so I stuck around. However, a shocking number of people still don’t use an ad blocker, such as Ublock Origin on Firefox, and they seem to just tolerate the ads. These changes happen so gradually, that people get used to them.
My guess is that YT will keep on making the service worse every year, and eventually it will be the time to kill the API. At that point, everything else will probably be so bad, that nobody will even notice the API any more.
You were ready to leave over a banner ad? What should YouTube do to recoup the cost of running the service? Not even make a profit, just the cost of existing at the scale it exists is expensive. Unobtrusive banner ads seemed like the right “price” for the service. Having ads tell me I’m fat and need whatever they’re hucking or scare monger me to vote a certain way are too much, but banners seemed fair.
what if YouTube crosses the line. which corporation is interested and have enough computing power to make a YouTube alternative?
Meta made a twitter clone when they had the chance, they’ll happily make a YouTube clone.
I don’t think Amazon or Microsoft are very interested in entering that market, but they are the only ones with the money and compute to support such a platform.
Maybe Netflix could be interested? But I doubt it
People have seriously suggested that Mindgeek (Pornhub) could do it. Video content delivery infrastructure is eye-wateringly expensive but Mindgeek’s systems already deliver petabytes of content a day.
This was memed a lot but if they seriously get involved then I think there’s a good chance that their competitor would genuinely be successful as long as they can correctly distance themselves from the pornography aspect of their business.
Edit: They also own algorithms to find and recommend videos to users, robust commenting and user interaction features on their platform, and the placement and frequency of advertising are more or less acceptable on their platform.
I could see TikTok trying to eat YouTube’s lunch with extended length, or Twitch offering videos.
Amazon. MS. Meta. Musk.
Nobody good.
Providing an API is not a service for the users, but a way with which they make sure to waste less resources. You either offer an API with all benefits for both parties, or you’re going to get scraped to ashes.
Because alternative front-ends don’t use YouTube API.
