7 ms·

YouTube quietly made some of its web embeds worse, including ours

96 points by Amorymeltzer 2y ago

NooneAtAll3 2y ago
even without embeds, youtube keeps loading video but not the rest of UI (or sometimes the opposite) from time to time for me and simple refresh doesn't help - I have to ctrl+f5 to fix it
- Hendrikto 2y ago
  In which browser? I have the feeling that Google degrades the experience in everything but Chrome.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    Chrome has mysterious issues particularly relating to shorts for me as well.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
Ugh. Any reason that they couldn't add a basic text link, below the video, with "Open In YouTube" as the text?
- feraloink 2y ago
  Yes, my thought too, especially since the basic embed allows you to click on the YouTube logo to be able to view the video on the YouTube website. Unless YouTube is deliberately not allowing high traffic publishing "partners" (?) like the Verge and Vox to get the benefit of their preferred advertising?!
- mongol 2y ago
  Of course they can. So can every other site that is affected. But seems not optimal.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  Visual clutter, for starters. And having to then consider the usability implications of having a separate link, how to lay it out across devices, etc. Just having the embed do that saves _a lot_ of hassle in a CMS.
jbaber 2y ago
This explains a mystery I only recently noticed. If a site has preferred ads they'd like to show anyway, maybe it's time for them to pay for hosting the video elsewhere.
- Hendrikto 2y ago
  There is a revenue share, so they are already paying for the video hosting.
  - spwa4 2y ago
    Paying means giving the entity delivering the service what they want for it. Not "giving something". If I steal your car, and leave a $100 bill, it's definitely still stealing.
Hendrikto 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
nonelog 2y ago
[flagged]
- Udo 2y ago
  > You may check out Rumble.com as a video player alternative. Although I'm not familiar with the Rumble player, I assume your advice implies that they'd have to host their videos on Rumble as well. The main issue described in the article is about controlling what gets published on their site and what the user experience is going to be. Hosting their videos on a competitor's service is not the answer to that, as it would simply make them dependent yet on another company. Media outlets that are large enough to need that kind of control but not large enough to host their own data are in a tough spot there.
- pratnala 2y ago
  That's a terrible suggestion.
- wazoox 2y ago
  Rumble is not available in any EU country, nor in Norway, and probably many other places too.
mabedan 2y ago
Makes sense from YouTube side. Why they would associate themselves with ads that has nothing to do with them?
- bspammer 2y ago
  Who is this hypothetical person who gets outraged at YouTube for having one of their videos embedded on a page with objectionable adverts? I’m sorry but their stated reason is crazy, I can put any site in an iframe on my website, that doesn’t mean they’re associated with me.
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  YouTube has only the most minimal standards for which ads they won’t run, and those standards apply to PfP as well. “Association” is not the issue.
  - n144q 2y ago
    This. I would say publishers generally have much better taste than YouTube.
- sunaookami 2y ago
  Come on, the YouTube player is so popular, everyone already knows this is just a YouTube embed.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
You can't have it both ways or at least YouTube tried to help publishers out with the special player. What's the actual problem here: that Verge doesn't like entitled ppl complaining to them about lack of links. Verge is trying to be one of those very publishers going independent etc, so support them, expect to 'stay on site', can't have it both ways. (Unless Verge does the extra work for the users and adds a quick link under every vid)
- n144q 2y ago
  Yeah, asking for links is a entitled thing to do.
wruza 2y ago
You can simply install uBO (and its dependencies) and the question who’s gonna profit from ads will resolve naturally.
- Incipient 2y ago
  Isn't all that going to eventually go away with in-stream advertising?
  - meiraleal 2y ago
    The day it becomes impossible (or too difficult) to not watch ads, youtube will start to die. And it will be fast. There is no reason to not use bittorrent for videos and music, it is just that using youtube with ad block is a little bit more convenient. But their recommendation algorithm is so terrible that I'm wondering about stopping using by myself. Not worth it.
  - wruza 2y ago
    Then we'll community mark key p-hashes to black-rectangle it, leaving them holding the encoding costs bag. Then they will try to double down and e.g. use gen-ai to create fully dynamic unique ads, then we'll use ML to detect these ads. Not watching ads doesn't go away in the foreseeable future, but ads do. The more people try it, the closer we are to the critical mass of realization that their ads are just bs, and there's no going back. They could stop bs-ing people a while ago and live forever, but they chose death by their own hands - the more annoying they are, the more "product" they lose to ad blocking, the less money they generate, the less they can do about it. They are already choking hard, it's apparent from convulsions like subj, mv3, anti-block attempts, etc.
    - Incipient 2y ago
      If they still send the ads, and some number of people just black window them for the duration...I'm not really sure if Google will mind! They'll call it a view and still sell the ad. Depends if it sees to impact advertisers ROI I suppose...
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Would it have killed him to put an example YouTube embed in the article so we could see the effect?
- codetrotter 2y ago
  Preferably screenshots, since the embedded player could change again or even appear differently for different people.
xbmcuser 2y ago
Is it not normal web etiquette to link back to what you are using. I am not sure YouTube is in the wrong.
- croes 2y ago
  Wasn‘t that the case before the change? You clicked the title and went to YouTube.
FollowingTheDao 2y ago
Monopolistic greed! Thee companies have captured all of us and they have the ability not to not care about customer service anymore! Break them up!
- rglullis 2y ago
  > companies have captured all of us No, they didn't. They baited the large majority with convenience and promises of free services, who got into the trap happily. Those of us who were warning about the importance of not giving up our self-sovereignty are free. All it requires is just a little bit of effort to self-host things. Stop being lazy and crying for regulation, when the people themselves can take action.
  - FollowingTheDao 2y ago
    >Stop being lazy and crying for regulation, when the people themselves can take action. Currently using a $200 laptop with linux, browsing with Firefox, watch any videos through redirect and invideous, have a host file block and using Mullvad. My phone is a $120 android with no google account getting apps though software using f-droid and auroa. I back up nothing to the cloud. I use signal for all messaging and I pay for a private and green email service. Please don't assume what I am doing and what I am warning about. When I say "Us" I include myself because I am part of the community. When others are trapped I am also trapped because other use these services and I have to communicate through them. I am trapped because I have to constantly use effort to get out of these traps. Asking people to "self host" when they can barely use an iPhone is just ridiculous.
    - rglullis 2y ago
      > Asking people to "self host" when they can barely use an iPhone is just ridiculous. It's not people that I am asking to self-host. It's the companies. Instead of the Verge writing an article complaining about Youtube, it would be infinitely more productive if they got together with other publishers and put up one video instance platform of their own. Hell, they could even get to write more than one article about it after that.
mrweasel 2y ago
Where YouTube is making a mistake is in showing ads on embedded videos, for YouTube Premium customers and you can no longer click on the embed to go to YouTube and see the video without the ads. I'm not sure if this is something each site can control using the embed code, but I noticed more and more that embedded videos will no longer allow you to jump youtube.com.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Zealotux 2y ago
Is anyone else experiencing huge issues with Youtube on Firefox (MacOS) lately? The UI completely hangs for a few seconds, a restart of the browser helps, but I've disabled all extensions and it still hangs. Using the devtools it seems there's a huge GC happening periodically blocking the JS thread, no idea why.
- 6510 2y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/
- ravenstine 2y ago
  I recently experienced an issue with YouTube + Firefox + macOS where not only did parts of the UI lag bug the queue wouldn't advance at the end of a video unless I refreshed the page. It resolved when I allowed google.com and a few others in NoScript. I wonder why your disabling of extensions didn't resolve your issue. I haven't had any more problems in the last few weeks. Also, I'm on an M3 CPU.
- perryizgr8 2y ago
  Just today a video became extremely choppy and then stopped. A refresh fixed it. Same setup as yours.
- tushar-r 2y ago
  I'm seeing this suddenly with Firefox on Windows. Persists even after reboots.
- davidivadavid 2y ago
  Was reading the comments to see if anyone experienced just that. Youtube sometimes becomes absolutely unusable with Firefox. Google Flights too. Would hate to switch back to Chrome but I keep having to switch back and forth.
- tomatotomato37 2y ago
  That sounds similar to issues I've been having recently with my Firefox uMatrix setup, which only seems to resolve when I blanket-allow everything (which kinda defeats the whole point of having it)
encody 2y ago
Wait, so the Verge is upset that the PfP player removed a link that would take the user to the video on YouTube. But if they use the normal YouTube player that has the link, the Verge gets less ad $. But the users who click the link would be watching on YouTube, where again, the Verge would be earning less ad $. Am I understanding this correctly? Because it sounds like the Verge is complaining about a change that should net them marginally more(?) ad $ (and is to YouTube's disadvantage) because a few readers complained, and they're just trying to blame YouTube instead. I'm confused.
- ghusto 2y ago
  They're not trying to blame YouTube, they are squarely pointing out the absolute truth that YouTube is to blame. It's YouTube's choice to do whatever they like with their own product, but the reason what they've chosen to do is problematic is: 1. It's yet another bait'n'switch 2. It is shady as fuck to not only make no announcement about the change, but make it difficult to even figure out what's happened In short; yes it's Google's prerogative to be a bag of dicks, but let's not pretend that's not exactly what they are (continuing to be)
  - gruez 2y ago
    >2. It is shady as fuck to not only make no announcement about the change, but make it difficult to even figure out what's happened Source for this claim? The article doesn't make this accusation, and considering this is a B2B product that requires manual approval to use, I wouldn't be surprised if they sent out this as email rather than something to their blog. Searching for "YouTube Player for Publishers", it looks like their last mention of that product was in 2018, and it was only a passing mention.
    - ghusto 2y ago
      It's literally the title of the article: "YouTube quietly made some of its web embeds worse, including ours"
      - 2y ago

96 points by Amorymeltzer 2y ago

even without embeds, youtube keeps loading video but not the rest of UI (or sometimes the opposite) from time to time for me and simple refresh doesn't help - I have to ctrl+f5 to fix it

Hendrikto 2y ago
In which browser? I have the feeling that Google degrades the experience in everything but Chrome.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  Chrome has mysterious issues particularly relating to shorts for me as well.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

Ugh. Any reason that they couldn't add a basic text link, below the video, with "Open In YouTube" as the text?

feraloink 2y ago
Yes, my thought too, especially since the basic embed allows you to click on the YouTube logo to be able to view the video on the YouTube website. Unless YouTube is deliberately not allowing high traffic publishing "partners" (?) like the Verge and Vox to get the benefit of their preferred advertising?!
mongol 2y ago
Of course they can. So can every other site that is affected. But seems not optimal.
rcarmo 2y ago
Visual clutter, for starters. And having to then consider the usability implications of having a separate link, how to lay it out across devices, etc. Just having the embed do that saves _a lot_ of hassle in a CMS.

jbaber 2y ago

This explains a mystery I only recently noticed. If a site has preferred ads they'd like to show anyway, maybe it's time for them to pay for hosting the video elsewhere.

Hendrikto 2y ago
There is a revenue share, so they are already paying for the video hosting.
- spwa4 2y ago
  Paying means giving the entity delivering the service what they want for it. Not "giving something". If I steal your car, and leave a $100 bill, it's definitely still stealing.

Hendrikto 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

nonelog 2y ago

[flagged]

Udo 2y ago
> You may check out Rumble.com as a video player alternative. Although I'm not familiar with the Rumble player, I assume your advice implies that they'd have to host their videos on Rumble as well. The main issue described in the article is about controlling what gets published on their site and what the user experience is going to be. Hosting their videos on a competitor's service is not the answer to that, as it would simply make them dependent yet on another company. Media outlets that are large enough to need that kind of control but not large enough to host their own data are in a tough spot there.
pratnala 2y ago
That's a terrible suggestion.
wazoox 2y ago
Rumble is not available in any EU country, nor in Norway, and probably many other places too.

mabedan 2y ago

Makes sense from YouTube side. Why they would associate themselves with ads that has nothing to do with them?

bspammer 2y ago
Who is this hypothetical person who gets outraged at YouTube for having one of their videos embedded on a page with objectionable adverts? I’m sorry but their stated reason is crazy, I can put any site in an iframe on my website, that doesn’t mean they’re associated with me.
snowwrestler 2y ago
YouTube has only the most minimal standards for which ads they won’t run, and those standards apply to PfP as well. “Association” is not the issue.
- n144q 2y ago
  This. I would say publishers generally have much better taste than YouTube.
sunaookami 2y ago
Come on, the YouTube player is so popular, everyone already knows this is just a YouTube embed.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

You can't have it both ways or at least YouTube tried to help publishers out with the special player. What's the actual problem here: that Verge doesn't like entitled ppl complaining to them about lack of links. Verge is trying to be one of those very publishers going independent etc, so support them, expect to 'stay on site', can't have it both ways. (Unless Verge does the extra work for the users and adds a quick link under every vid)

n144q 2y ago
Yeah, asking for links is a entitled thing to do.

wruza 2y ago

You can simply install uBO (and its dependencies) and the question who’s gonna profit from ads will resolve naturally.

Incipient 2y ago
Isn't all that going to eventually go away with in-stream advertising?
- meiraleal 2y ago
  The day it becomes impossible (or too difficult) to not watch ads, youtube will start to die. And it will be fast. There is no reason to not use bittorrent for videos and music, it is just that using youtube with ad block is a little bit more convenient. But their recommendation algorithm is so terrible that I'm wondering about stopping using by myself. Not worth it.
- wruza 2y ago
  Then we'll community mark key p-hashes to black-rectangle it, leaving them holding the encoding costs bag. Then they will try to double down and e.g. use gen-ai to create fully dynamic unique ads, then we'll use ML to detect these ads. Not watching ads doesn't go away in the foreseeable future, but ads do. The more people try it, the closer we are to the critical mass of realization that their ads are just bs, and there's no going back. They could stop bs-ing people a while ago and live forever, but they chose death by their own hands - the more annoying they are, the more "product" they lose to ad blocking, the less money they generate, the less they can do about it. They are already choking hard, it's apparent from convulsions like subj, mv3, anti-block attempts, etc.
  - Incipient 2y ago
    If they still send the ads, and some number of people just black window them for the duration...I'm not really sure if Google will mind! They'll call it a view and still sell the ad. Depends if it sees to impact advertisers ROI I suppose...

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Would it have killed him to put an example YouTube embed in the article so we could see the effect?

codetrotter 2y ago
Preferably screenshots, since the embedded player could change again or even appear differently for different people.

xbmcuser 2y ago

Is it not normal web etiquette to link back to what you are using. I am not sure YouTube is in the wrong.

croes 2y ago
Wasn‘t that the case before the change? You clicked the title and went to YouTube.

FollowingTheDao 2y ago

Monopolistic greed! Thee companies have captured all of us and they have the ability not to not care about customer service anymore! Break them up!

rglullis 2y ago
> companies have captured all of us No, they didn't. They baited the large majority with convenience and promises of free services, who got into the trap happily. Those of us who were warning about the importance of not giving up our self-sovereignty are free. All it requires is just a little bit of effort to self-host things. Stop being lazy and crying for regulation, when the people themselves can take action.
- FollowingTheDao 2y ago
  >Stop being lazy and crying for regulation, when the people themselves can take action. Currently using a $200 laptop with linux, browsing with Firefox, watch any videos through redirect and invideous, have a host file block and using Mullvad. My phone is a $120 android with no google account getting apps though software using f-droid and auroa. I back up nothing to the cloud. I use signal for all messaging and I pay for a private and green email service. Please don't assume what I am doing and what I am warning about. When I say "Us" I include myself because I am part of the community. When others are trapped I am also trapped because other use these services and I have to communicate through them. I am trapped because I have to constantly use effort to get out of these traps. Asking people to "self host" when they can barely use an iPhone is just ridiculous.
  - rglullis 2y ago
    > Asking people to "self host" when they can barely use an iPhone is just ridiculous. It's not people that I am asking to self-host. It's the companies. Instead of the Verge writing an article complaining about Youtube, it would be infinitely more productive if they got together with other publishers and put up one video instance platform of their own. Hell, they could even get to write more than one article about it after that.

mrweasel 2y ago

Where YouTube is making a mistake is in showing ads on embedded videos, for YouTube Premium customers and you can no longer click on the embed to go to YouTube and see the video without the ads. I'm not sure if this is something each site can control using the embed code, but I noticed more and more that embedded videos will no longer allow you to jump youtube.com.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Zealotux 2y ago

Is anyone else experiencing huge issues with Youtube on Firefox (MacOS) lately? The UI completely hangs for a few seconds, a restart of the browser helps, but I've disabled all extensions and it still hangs. Using the devtools it seems there's a huge GC happening periodically blocking the JS thread, no idea why.

6510 2y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/
ravenstine 2y ago
I recently experienced an issue with YouTube + Firefox + macOS where not only did parts of the UI lag bug the queue wouldn't advance at the end of a video unless I refreshed the page. It resolved when I allowed google.com and a few others in NoScript. I wonder why your disabling of extensions didn't resolve your issue. I haven't had any more problems in the last few weeks. Also, I'm on an M3 CPU.
perryizgr8 2y ago
Just today a video became extremely choppy and then stopped. A refresh fixed it. Same setup as yours.
tushar-r 2y ago
I'm seeing this suddenly with Firefox on Windows. Persists even after reboots.
davidivadavid 2y ago
Was reading the comments to see if anyone experienced just that. Youtube sometimes becomes absolutely unusable with Firefox. Google Flights too. Would hate to switch back to Chrome but I keep having to switch back and forth.
tomatotomato37 2y ago
That sounds similar to issues I've been having recently with my Firefox uMatrix setup, which only seems to resolve when I blanket-allow everything (which kinda defeats the whole point of having it)

encody 2y ago

Wait, so the Verge is upset that the PfP player removed a link that would take the user to the video on YouTube. But if they use the normal YouTube player that has the link, the Verge gets less ad $. But the users who click the link would be watching on YouTube, where again, the Verge would be earning less ad $. Am I understanding this correctly? Because it sounds like the Verge is complaining about a change that should net them marginally more(?) ad $ (and is to YouTube's disadvantage) because a few readers complained, and they're just trying to blame YouTube instead. I'm confused.

ghusto 2y ago
They're not trying to blame YouTube, they are squarely pointing out the absolute truth that YouTube is to blame. It's YouTube's choice to do whatever they like with their own product, but the reason what they've chosen to do is problematic is: 1. It's yet another bait'n'switch 2. It is shady as fuck to not only make no announcement about the change, but make it difficult to even figure out what's happened In short; yes it's Google's prerogative to be a bag of dicks, but let's not pretend that's not exactly what they are (continuing to be)
- gruez 2y ago
  >2. It is shady as fuck to not only make no announcement about the change, but make it difficult to even figure out what's happened Source for this claim? The article doesn't make this accusation, and considering this is a B2B product that requires manual approval to use, I wouldn't be surprised if they sent out this as email rather than something to their blog. Searching for "YouTube Player for Publishers", it looks like their last mention of that product was in 2018, and it was only a passing mention.
  - ghusto 2y ago
    It's literally the title of the article: "YouTube quietly made some of its web embeds worse, including ours"
    - 2y ago