YouTube might terminate your access if not profitable for Google https://www.youtube.com/t/terms?preview=20191210#main > Terminations by YouTube for Service Changes > > YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable. |
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21502162
> 14 hours ago
I see that YouTube have following options: 1.) Show more ads elsewhere (so other people will pay the price). 2.) Terminate your account. 3.) Charge you money.
From those, actually 2/3 seems like the best (and being able to do #2 will give them leverage for you to pay #3).
I'm afraid that if a policy to terminate channels early and often is pursued then we will end up with a YouTube entirely populated by channels that just seek to maximize engagement at the expense of quality. This is sad but YouTube has been on the decline for some time, there is still a lot good about it but they seem to be intent on transforming it into the antithesis of what made it successful in the first place. Same old story.
Just like Medium did (and does). This will probably kill the plataform success...
If you want an archive, go with archive.org. But even then, nothing is free. If somebody thinks a footage deserves to be archived and preserved, somebody needs to pay for the cost anyhow, e.g. via donations.
and one of the costs youtube bears, since by definition they can't make money off those videos, but has to pay for storage.
I dont know if there's a solution - perhaps non-commercialized accounts can't upload more than X gigabytes of vidoes, or be forced to have ads? Or you (the channel owner) pay for the storage?
Yet his videos get tens and hundreds of thousands of views (occasionally even millions), and are 15-20 minutes each (even Jim Sterling must play to the algorithm). 3-4 of such videos every week have to represent the very definition of commercially not viable for Google.
> YouTube reserves the right to discontinue any aspect of the Service at any time.
So this, the notification, and the ability to appeal seem like significant improvements.
You can't just decide to show ads on your videos. Youtube requires you to meet certain guidelines. The last time I checked you need 4,000+ hours of view time each year and 1,000+ subscribers to be allowed to show ads on your videos.
That means smaller channels who have limited audiences would have no way to avoid termination because Youtube is blocking themselves from generating revenue from that channel due to their own monetization rules.
It might take 6 months or even a year+ of dedicated uploading to meet those guidelines for most content (unless it's a really popular / trending niche like a new game, etc.).
If Youtube starts banning those accounts then they are effectively not allowing anyone else to join their platform because they would be terminated before they have a chance to get popular enough to enable ads so that Youtube can make money.
I also did a quick search and it's been a while since both Gmail/Google accounts and YouTube accounts are tied to one another.[2][3]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/markiplier-youtube-fans-heis...
[2] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/1692/how-do-i-un...
Having said that, obviously YT can ban you for any reason whatsoever.
I am tired of all these giant sites de facto controlling information repositories and communications channels because they have ad-sponsored inertia.
The great conondrum of software...
I can see some unfortunate users learning the hard way why reliance on these huge cloud services can backfire. And some people may just create a lot of secondary accounts so they can continue uploading whatever they want, so I'm not sure Google will actually get improvements from this TOS.
This is most likely just a random change that gets blown way out of proportion, it's not like Google hasn't banned people for any BS reason they could come up with before.
Maybe I can finally ditch Google once and for all if they just terminate my account for me.
I cannot find any related clause in the current ToS https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms
I am expecting something like "pay for subscription or else" feature proposal in the observable future.
e.g. using their own web server, p2p network or other centralized/walled (hosted) services.
- "If the service becomes too expensive for us, we'll close shop"
- "If you block ads, we'll close your account"
- "If you upload too much, we'll close your account"
That's a huge if - one that Youtube probably is not going to enforce on new customers. The same principle applies to most businesses I know - a new account/client has X months to be profitable until they get dropped.
On the flip side, i've often stumbled (in the days where I was parsing youtube for side projects) on projects with hours long videos with 3 views - for years. My best guess would be that those accounts / uploads are what youtube is targeting, not preventing their new account sign up / new DAU drop.
Sure they can make money off them - they just need to be creative. For example, you can have a category of 'archived videos' to which you need to pay to be able to access. The payment is for the service, not for the video so it does not matter what are the specific settings on a specific video.
Not free, but cutting off say 10% of uploads to save ~0.3% is not going to help their bottom line much as they would lose out on some viral videos and future stars in the process. Plus, there are minimum view requirements before revenue sharing. Worse they could easily lose their spot as the default location for video uploads long term.
Choose two: a) free* b) reliable c) universal
* not counting ads.
there are means to identify (and block) unique users without them needing to have an account. Heck, there's even means to identify the usage of an ad-blocker and/or youtube-dl and to refuse to provide the video for such cases.