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.
Here’s the really long version: like everyone, we publish our videos on YouTube
I think I’ve found the underlying issue
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.
It’s all going to shit. Let’s burn it all down and start over. Will it be better then? Probably not, but burning it down will feel good I imagine.
Just like a forest, sometimes it is the best medicine.
Just start ignoring it. There’s a simple ad free Internet out there, you just need to start using it as your go-to.
No need to burn it down it’s gonna crumble on its own.
I just click the little YouTube icon that takes me to the page too.
the only way to get that link back is by using a slightly different player that pays us less and YouTube more.
Add a “watch on YouTube” link above or below your embedded videos?
Don’t host on YouTube? They’re a big company, I’m sure they’ve got the resources for a couple of video files.
Then they need to find advertisers. This is the hard part. Advertisers are familiar with the platform and tools of YouTube, having them to submit ads in other platforms is where the for-profit video hosting becomes tricky
Use another platform instead?
I wondered about that.
