YouTube

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YouTube

Basic Information
Release Year	2005
Product Type	Video sharing and streaming
In Production	Yes
Official Website	https://youtube.com

YouTube, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, is a global video-sharing platform and one of the most visited websites in the world. Acquired by Google in 2006, YouTube has since become the dominant platform for sharing videos on the internet.

YouTube's business model is built around advertising revenue, with creators earning money through ad views, subscriptions, and other monetization options. The platform hosts a wide range of content, including music videos, tutorials, news, vlogs, and live streams. YouTube has also begun offering subscription services, such as YouTube Premium and YouTube TV, for ad-free experiences, exclusive content, and live television.

YouTube has faced criticism and regulatory scrutiny on multiple fronts. Concerns have been raised about content moderation policies, the platform's role in the spread of misinformation, and its impact on user privacy, particularly in relation to data collection practices. Additionally, YouTube has been under fire for its algorithms, which some argue promote harmful or divisive content to maximize engagement.

Incidents

Advertising overload on YouTube

See also: Advertising Overload

Advertisements are YouTube's primary source of revenue, but because the platform is run by a publicly shared parent company, it is forced to grow its revenue by any means necessary. This has led to advertisements becoming more pervasive on the platform such as an increasing number of spaces for static ads, longer ad breaks (which some users have documented being longer than the videos they watch), increased ad frequency in videos, and poorer quality ads. Practices are also put into place in order to force non-paying users into seeing these ads as well, such as subscription-gating playing videos in the background.

Furthermore, even if a user pays for YouTube premium, they do not necessarily receive an ad-free experience - they may still see ads within the video they watch, such as sponsored segments. YouTube has added a "skip" feature, but it has been reported that this does not work consistently.

Refusal to handle malicious ads

A common phenomenon on YouTube's advertisements is content that is mature and/or malicious in nature. The content of these advertisements include pornography, false advertising, scams, and far more. Rather than working towards clearing these ads, or acknowledging this advertising content that has been harming consumers on the platform, YouTube moderation has only cut the revenue for these videos that attempt to call out these ads, which has been known to make said videos be less-showcased.

Demonetization and censorship

Since at least 2016, YouTube has had an extensive record of censoring content that is demonetized. Within understandable circumstances, legitimately malicious or offensive videos would be demonetized and should not be shown on the platform, however, how videos are considered to be demonetized has had a harmful impact upon both viewers and content creators. Trans creators on YouTube for example, have experienced unfair censorship via demonetization since 2018. Content creators affected by this unfairly balanced moderation via algorithms have dubbed these events as "adpocalypses".

Irresponsibly automated moderation

When YouTube integrated the ability to take down videos via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), they decided to often handle takedown requests in an automated manner. This automation has led to an excess in fraudulent DMCA takedowns of content, even going so far as to have Bungie call out YouTube in a legal case for their negligence. These takedown requests have ranged from users impersonating corporations, to users impersonating other users.

Crackdown against ad-blockers

Related to the incessant usage of ads on the platform and multitudes of harmful and scam ads that have gotten through YouTube's advertising system, consumers have been needing to use ad blockers while on the platform merely to watch their videos. Unfortunately, Google sparked a game of cat and mouse, and has been attempting to integrate a variant of DRM onto YouTube to make consumers watch ads. However, these attempts usually only work for a short period of time before ad blocking tools find new ways to circumvent the advertisements, resulting in these actions taking place reflecting the Streisand effect.

There have also been attempts to inject ads directly into video streams, which has disrupted extensions such as SponsorBlock, a community-driven tool for automatically skipping sponsored segments. Users submit timestamps marking the start and end of sponsored segments. The add-on's functionality is severely weakened when personalized ads, which have different durations and appear at varying timestamps for individual viewers, are injected directly into video streams.

Google has directly confirmed attempts to harm the experience of users who use ad blockers and also Firefox via intentionally slowing down connection speeds by 5 seconds.

Further viewing: 

Offline video DRM

The YouTube Mobile app allows you to download videos for offline consumption if you have a YouTube Premium subscription. However, the app's DRM prevents you from watching downloaded videos, unless the app has "phoned home" in the last 48 hours. This caveat is not clearly disclosed on the main YouTube Premium page, instead requiring the user to navigate support articles to discover this limitation.

Universal DRM testing

YouTube on TV is a HTML5 web interface from Google to allow supported devices such as game consoles which do not have a native YouTube app to view content via YouTube. An A/B experiment has begun which protects all video and audio content regardless of bitrate or format via the YouTube on TV platform with DRM. One XBox 360 user reported that the YouTube on TV functionality stopped working as a result of the DRM implementation. A number of content creators license their work uploaded to YouTube via the Creative Commons licenses. The universal implementation of DRM to restrict a users ability to exercise their rights granted by the license is a violation of the aforementioned licenses.

Paywalling standard browser features

Another premium feature of the YouTube mobile app is the ability to play videos in the background. Without a premium subscription, neither the app nor a web browser will play YouTube videos in the background. However, the default HTML5 video player supports this with no extra effort needed from the developer.

Removal of the dislike count on videos

On November 10 2021, YouTube removed the public dislike count from all of its videos. Creators are still be able to view dislike counts on their videos through the YouTube Studio website and app.

According to YouTube. this was implemented after user testing revealed that users were less likely to feel incentivized to actively try and manipulate the dislike count on videos if the dislike count was not visible to them.

Anti-Features and dark patterns to trick the user into staying longer

YouTube has introduced multiple features that are designed to make the user stay longer on the platform and watch more videos than they intended, thus increasing ad revenue. They come at the cost of making it harder to watch the content the user actually wants to watch.

This includes the introduction of a feature called Autoplay that resumes playback of another video (chosen by the platform) immediately after the current one ends (after a delay of about 8 seconds), in the hope that the user gets hooked and continues to watch. This feature is activated by default (opt-out instead of opt-in).

Another feature like this is the inclusion of irrelevant videos in search results. If the user searches for something and scrolls down the list too far, the likelihood of them finding what they were looking for decreases since results are generally sorted by what the platform deems relevant to the search query. Hence, if the user scrolls down too far, it is likely that they give up and leave the site. Therefore YouTube stared to add random videos out of its recommendation list for the user into the search results, increasing the probability that they see something they will click and watch. This makes it much harder and more inconvenient to find relevant search results since the user has to scroll past all the noise that is designed to distract them. It also means that a video that is actually relevant is less likely to be discovered, especially if it still has low view counts, since unrelated videos are promoted in search in its place.