Why doesn't youtube shut down their public web api?
Why doesn't youtube shut down their public web api?
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??
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
Amazon. MS. Meta. Musk.
Nobody good.
Off the top of my head
Potentially odeysee, peertube, or maybe even twitch, more likely I could see subscription platforms like patreon and nebula taking over
Potentially something entirely new, I don't know
Even with their recent efforts to squeeze money out of their users by killing adblockers and pushing even more intrusive ads, they still don't make a profit. And that's with 100% of the market share. There just isn't a way for another company to come in and unseat youtube, and youtube knows it. Hence why they feel they can get away with pretty much any anti-consumer move they can dream up.
They just have to keep users happy enough that nobody at microsoft/amazon decides to start their own money pit out of spite, and all that tasty data remains theirs for the indefinite future.
TikTok
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.
Projects using YouTube API have to agree to ToS. That's why Google want them to use API instead of web scraping.
God bless you, Chad 3rd Party Web Scraper! 🫡
Me being like:
Not a Scraper or API user
Has no use for the data
Sees meme
Becomes Scraper because Cool 1337 HaxorMan
Prediction:
Becomes addicted to it
It's the path I followed with using Linux, the terminal and a tiling window manager.
Requiring a login would probably cut off a significant portion of their audience and ad revenue. Only Google analysts know for sure, but if the eyeballs lost to cutting off casual visitors (sent to YT from links or embeds, etc) are greater than the losses due to, frankly, a small portion of users who would just end up blocking ads in other ways, it's a net loss for Google.
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.
Maybe Embedded videos? Can't require login for those
twitter does that, it's blocked but the embedded posts still work
yeah, that makes sense.
It's not about bandwidth, it's about ad revenue.
Newpipe doesn't use the Youtube API. https://newpipe.net/FAQ/download/
