Oh I am sure it will have positive impact on their tracking; that much is guaranteed. What I am saying is that they chose a very lame way to do it and this rob

Oh I am sure it will have positive impact on their tracking; that much is guaranteed. What I am saying is that they chose a very lame way to do it and this robs them of very valuable data they could get from those 5% and I'd argue that they really would want to know how you and me are moving and discovering stuff when we're outside YouTube. Trying hard not to have the protagonist syndrome here but I'd think they are more interested in how the non-couch-surfers do stuff. Though a very good counter-argument would be that they can now target ads better and probably gain slightly higher conversation regardless of us the 5% stripping the tracking parameter, and that would still be a huge financial win for them. All in all, my stance is: let them have it, but I still find it reassuring that they are not even covert about it which gives us a lot of options on how to deny them. Finally, there's the possibility of various browsers and addons to start automatically removing the tracking parameter, though such movements usually take years.