For about a year, I’ve gotten notes from readers asking why our YouTube embeds are broken in one very specific way: you can no longer click the title to open the video on YouTube.com or in the YouTube app. This used to work just fine, but now you can’t.
This bothers us, too, and it’s doubly frustrating because everyone assumes that we’ve chosen to disable links, which makes a certain kind of sense — after all, why on earth wouldn’t YouTube want people to click over to its app?
The short answer is money. Somewhat straightforwardly, YouTube has chosen to degrade the user experience of the embedded player publishers like Vox Media use, and the only way to get that link back is by using a slightly different player that pays us less and YouTube more.
This change actually seems worse for YouTube. Why wouldn’t they want to link back to their own platform?
They want to force you into the YouTube website for analytics and watching habits. Maybe you’ll find a video that catches your fancy and spend longer on there.
That doesn’t make sense in this case. The opposite in fact, as pointed out in the text. They removed the link that leads to that scenario. So now they just use a slightly different player to get that behavior.
Different CDN that throttles videos that only allows 480p resolution max. You’ll have to go to the main website to watch anything higher.
Or they’re prepping for locking higher resolution through a paywall or you have to be logged in to watch 720p or higher.
The player that got the link back to Youtube removed allows publishers to sell their own ads. Seems like Youtube is worried about the content of ads it doesn’t control and wants to limit its association with them, so if, say, someone sees a porn ad, they blame the site the player is on, not Youtube.
The short answer is money. Somewhat straightforwardly, YouTube has chosen to degrade the user experience of the embedded player publishers like Vox Media use, and the only way to get that link back is by using a slightly different player that pays us less and YouTube more.