YouTube is cracking down on external links in videos | Hacker News Reader

YouTube is cracking down on external links in videos

engadget.com

115 pointsbipr067 comments

Its about time. The Youtube UI has become a disaster over the last few years. It all started with the ability to let uploaders "annotate" their videos. I've disabled the setting to show annotations probably a dozen times and they keep coming back. I can't figure out if the setting is poorly implemented or if youtube is deliberately switching the setting back.

> I've disabled the setting to show annotations probably a dozen times and they keep coming back. I can't figure out if the setting is poorly implemented or if youtube is deliberately switching the setting back.

It could be different now, but the last time I tried to answer this the answer was that preference is stored in a cookie and not globally. I have my browser set to dump cookies when it closes so I kept losing that setting.

Do you have an adblocker? It makes it very easy to block anotations and all other kinds of annoying crap.

I've never been able to get the disable annotations option to stick. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and it's been that way for years. Very annoying.

I don't think it's persistent if you don't log in. There is an account-level setting (not a video-level setting) which I the gp is talking about.

It seems like a better approach would be to just get rid of those annotations. I don't know how anyone ever thought that was a good idea.

But YT should let them link externally. Site's like Patreon are beneficial to everyone involved.

I've been watching tutorial videos on software packages recently, and one really nice use case for annotations is that if there is out of date information in a specific sentence, they can just annotate it with the newer info instead of redoing the entire video.

It's also helpful when they use the links as intended, like the video links to its own follow up video at the end.

Yea, this is the case with almost every channel I watch. I've found annotations and links to be used responsibly and to usually be helpful.

I can totally see how these features could be abused by some channels, though.

I can echo what the others have already commented, which is that in the overwhelming majority of videos from channels that I have subscribed to, the annotations have been useful.

Getting rid of them entirely would get rid of an easy and much needed way for the uploader to add corrections and other additions after the fact.

I do see videos where the annotations are rather annoying, but I don't think it's so often that it has been a terrible problem overall, and I have a suspicion that on those videos the annotations have not been the only annoying aspect.

Edit: I just saw further down that annotations are actually deprecated, and now I really wonder how people can add corrections to videos? Does that mean I have to read the description of every video I watch?

How to add corrections to post? Well, reply to your own video with a blank post so its top post and reserved. Edit it to add corrections.

I just regard annotations and commercials (which aren't blocked by uBlock Origin) as part of a video. If you (or I) don't enjoy a video (for whatever reason), stopping watching it is always an option to consider.

Agreed, but this move seems like a grab at Patreon and self promotion in general. Users can still put obnoxious annotations up.

> Users can still put obnoxious annotations up.

No, annotations are deprecated, you can't add them to videos anymore. [0]

[0]: https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2017/03/keep-fans-en...

Wow, that is utterly disgusting and an attack on their own user base.

Huh, so, how will uploaders update corrections and other additions after the fact?

You can add "cards", i.e. the popups in the top right that show a short text and an "i" button. Those can be links to videos, polls, or external links (if you're a big youtuber). However the text is limited, you can't set how long it shows, and you can have a maximum of 5. You can maybe use subtitles too, but you cannot set a default subtitle for your video.

So there are hacky half-working workarounds, but otherwise youtube just told everyone who cares about their videos to go and kindly get fucked.

Well, how about reuploading if you fuck up the editing process, and trying not to fuck up the next time?

Then YouTube dumps all of your views and upvotes for that video. Annotations were the way around not being able to edit in place.

Who said anything about editing errors? I am talking about things like exploratory engineering videos, where the creator is speculating about certain things that get apparent only after the video has been uploaded, sometimes with the help of viewers.

It is for example not uncommon in teardown, some done by leading engineers in their entire field, to find out what some proprietarily marked chip is a few days after the fact. This is not a “fuck up”.

Reediting and reuploading a video just to change a single (but possibly important) detail is not only a colossal waste of time and effort that could be better spent on other videos, as far as I know it will also present itself as a new video.

Your comment makes no sense whatsoever.

Seriously, good riddance. It added so much clutter to videos that I explicitly hid them any chance I got. I'd rather content creators just use the video description to communicate or edit their videos so that annotations would not be necessary.

So you read the entire description of a video before watching it and remember every word of it, including timestamps with comments to note corrections, even when there's 10 of them for a half hour video?

Annotations (in the sense of small snippets of text that display briefly to add info) are fine. What YouTube had in many cases was a poorly implemented MySpace page overlaid on the video. And as one of the parent posters said, the setting just kept turning itself back on no matter how many times you turned it off (on the video, or in your settings page).

"Many cases" is subjective and anecdotal. Maybe my set of youtubers i followed was particularly high quality, but almost all uses of annotations i have seen were to provide corrections to information found wrong in the video, or additional information learned after the video.

In some cases such things were applied quite heavily too.

And thus the point of my previous post is that for people doing serious work with their youtube videos providing corrections and such via the description is entirely untenable.

I'm sorry you've only seen spam, but cutting off another's tool because some people can't use it correctly is a severe case of FYGM.

I don't know why you got downvoted so much, I share the same experience.

I expect it's a side effect from casual youtube users who've mostly experienced abuse of the feature and think i'm lying.

I don't really have a "set of youtubers" that I follow and so most of the stuff I watch is from random sources. I think you're right that it depends hugely on who you're watching - random hobby / extreme sports videos seem to be particularly bad, but technical and engineering videos are usually fine.

I don't think they should take it away completely, just limit it so avoid the aforementioned 'myspace page' overuse.

If only there was a way to actually edit a video.

I promote my developer courses on Youtube with external links and this doesn't really change anything.

It just means anyone in this position has to join the partnership program, but they can continue to NOT show ads on their channel (I don't like ads, so I don't show them on my channel).

10,000 views is honestly not a lot. If you follow any reasonable Youtube strategy for creating content, you'll reach that in no time. It's a minor inconvenience at best.

It does worry me tho, because in the future they may do other things to deter third party links.

Also the ability to illustrate a video with an image that's not part of the video, has become a click bait paradise.

Unlike the additions, I really don't see how that feature is benefiting the platform except for some uploaders by, as you succinctly put it, providing click bait.

I really wish the video image would have to be a frame taken from the video. Make it any frame, if the uploader cares so much they can include the image as a title card and pick a frame from that.

Before the option to put a custom image existed, assholes would put the click-bait image for a few frames in the middle of the video. You can't win with such idiots.

install ImprovedTube Plus, turn off annotations in the extension, problem solved

There's a (fake) setting to globally disable annotations? Even if it doesn't work as Google describes it, I'm interested.

There's been one in the playback settings for years. https://www.youtube.com/account_playback

The answer to excess of marketing is censorship of the small accounts? This does not make any sense.

It's not just small accounts. It's also big accounts that are abusive.

Nice that they are getting rid of an irritating implementation.

But they aren't replacing the legitimate need. Some videos do benefit from background material. Or a patreon type link to support the content creator.

Google should address the need. Otherwise it just looks like a tactic to keep people on YouTube.

An important note here, if you cannot enable monetize videos, YouTube will not allow you to link to patreon or other sites.

https://i.imgur.com/byCxnAj.jpg

Its not enough for Google to ban you from ads, they have decided to cut off any other funding source aswell...

I really don't understand how they have made it to this point.

The government doesn't try to prevent monopolies anymore, and once you're a monopoly you have more than enough power to stop competitors if you pay even a modicum of attention to them

The problem is that YouTube isn’t a monopoly. There’s other video sharing sites available such as Vimeo. Also, everyone uses YouTube and private companies don’t have to respect the freedom of speech ideal.

The colliqual usage of monopoly does not mean that the group described as a monoply has 100% of the market as seen here[1]. Having nearly all of the market is sufficient to be described as a monopoly. Once you are able to unialterally affect the market as you wish, because you control such a large portion of it, you are exercising monoply power.

As an example Microsoft didn't control 100% of operating systems when the US government went after them, but they were still found to have been absuing their monoply power. Google putting their reviews above the search results when you search for a restaurant, which always made them appear before Yelp's, is pretty much the exact same situation as Microsoft forcing IE to be the default browser on Windows but you don't hear anyone in the government even hint at going after Google nowadays

[1]http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/monopoly.asp

That is absolutely disgusting, and may actually threaten any niche channel which is not mainstream enough to generate a significant amount of clicks, but which so far has been able to keep alive using Patreon and other donations.

That was my favorite thing about YouTube: Unlike Cable TV, not all content was converging towards the lowest common denominator, because creators of e.g. advanced science and engineering topics could keep afloat with the dedicated support of a small community.

At least (I hope) creators can still mention their Patreon in their videos.

Yep. This move is about removing "advertiser unfriendly" content from YT, nothing else.

My understanding is that demonetization for "advertiser unfriendliness" is per-video. It doesn't influence the capability of linking to external websites, since this is an account wide capability.

YouTube still hasn't stopped the hordes of fake accounts that spam every top creator's new videos.

Ex. PewDiePie video has a dozen comments from fake PewDiePie accounts (name, avatar) posting about "contest" link.

It drives me crazy how much this clutters search results. For years I would almost always sort by >20mins/upload date for whatever I was looking for (usually lectures/talks, hence the >20mins) but over the past few years where I used to get the most recent talk from $person, now I get a full page of reuploaded content from 1994, half of which is from the same spam user. Now my search of choice tends to be viewcount/<1month.

I now prefer mps-youtube for the majority of my youtube interaction. It's a gplv3 cli client, and then I just have VLC open up the video. No ads, no popups, no links.

https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

You know, a long time ago when google bought youtube I remember thinking to myself that it meant it was never going to be the same. After things like the google+ name fiasco, etc (Jawed Karim's first comment on youtube was: "why the fuck do i need a google+ account to comment on a video?"), and many other scandals, and not seeing hardly a dent in their userbase, I wonder what it would take to get the users to another platform?

From the article it sounds like it's more cracking down on people who rip off other people's content and then use the link cards to get referral traffic to their own properties.

I don't think legitimate creators need to be concerned. From the article, the minimum requirement to be a partner is 10K public views. That's a relatively low bar, and you shouldn't be trying to be monetize when you have that low of a view count anyway.

> you shouldn't be trying to be monetize when you have that low of a view count anyway.

Urm, why? Not everyone is in it for the advertisement money. Want to direct someone to a charity instead of supporting you? Not unless you're 10k+ Patreon? 10k+ Blueprints for the table you just built on screen? 10k+

Not to mention one of the requirements to be a partner is that your content is advertiser friendly. If you make videos about videogames, like Destiny 2, that rules you out.

What’s wrong with links in the description box in that case?

Many people ignore them and on mobile viewers need to do extra steps to even be able to see the description.

Even on mobile CTR for Description-Links is by far higher than for dynamic annotations.

Source: myself (approx. 80%+ mobile viewers on my channel)

What exactly do you mean by dynamic annotations?

I think outside of a YouTube network, 10k views equals about $0.10 in advertising money. So it's not even worth to donate this to charity.

The idea isn't to direct the add money to charity, but direct your viewers to charity. Depending on your audience, 10k views could be a fair bit of money that viewers are willing to pay if you ask them to.

Right, so fraudulent channels can steal your video and monetize immediately with external links vs. ad money. But if you're a legitimate channel that regularly promote a charity, great! You're a trusted partner because this is probably not your first time creating a video about this cause.

I'd be extremely wary if a new account popped up with only one video asking for you to click on a link and donate vs. a established YT channel that is promoting a charity regardless of view count.

Because 10K total public views is a vanity metric and people can just pump out total crap to get there. This to prevent a spam account from stealing content and monetizing immediately with external links vs. the grind of maximizing your view count. Last I heard 1 million views is about $2,000 in ad dollars from Google. Google has made it unfavorable to compensate based off of view count because there is so much inventory. So the only real way for creators to sustain are platforms like Patreon, selling merch, sponsored posts, or referral links base off of CPA. From what the article states, this prevents illegitimate accounts from siphoning from OPs.

If YT really wanted to keep the bar high in terms of quality creators they would base it off of number of subscribers and the level of engagement that those subscribers watch another video vs. a one hit wonder that goes viral.

Ironic how your answer to nullifying the “evil” spam is to force everyone else to create “good” spam. I mean “total crap”.

> From the article it sounds like it's more cracking down on people who rip off other people's content and then use the link cards to get referral traffic to their own properties.

That may be the intent, but they're doing it in a way that hurts others.

> I don't think legitimate creators need to be concerned.

It seems that legitimate creators disagree with you.

the sad part is how much some smaller posters have to fight to keep hold of their own videos. challenges are rife at times and during the challenge period there is no monetization and worse it can start all over immediately after proving it truly is your video

Considering the crap ratio in these obnoxious end-of-video links and the fact that external links in the video description (e.g. to point to additional information) are still allowed, I don't think this is a bad thing.

I'd probably prefer it if the same rules applied to anyone though.

Google is cracking down on links in their search results too, using AMP.

Was youtube always tracking links in Video description? I dont remember ever noticing it, spotted it yesterday, every non google link is redirected with https://www.youtube.com/redirect?redir_token=blabla+urlencod... link+video title

Think this happened within last 6-12 months. Not long ago it wasn't possible to see referral data from YouTube in something like Google Analytics without manually adding utm's. I noticed the data coming in automatically sometime in that period.

You know what I want YouTube to "crack" on? Assholes that say "But, what do you guys think? Let me know in the comments section bellow." Any video of those should be immediately demonetized.

This is a half serious rant, but seriously, video quality has gone so low over the last few years. There is practically a format that all those "professional" assholes follow. Does it really help them get more cash?

I believe number of minutes viewed, number of comments, and number of likes and dislikes all have a part in the algorithm for how well a video does in YouTube's eyes. So yes.

Of course source: professional YouTubers who have talked about the changes to the algorithm over the years.

I am not talking about the algorithm. I am asking whether saying "leave a comment" actually makes people leave a comment? For me, that acts as a detergent and an automatic down-vote. Are people that gullible that they subscribe when told to, comment when asked, etc?

I wouldn't consider myself a normal user, so I don't know.

"Like, comment, and subscribe" also was once a popular thing to say at the end of videos too. I'm sure for some individuals this would be beneficial to reinforce. For some it had no impact. For others (myself included) it would be mocked.

I guess the question is, does less than five seconds of text at the end of a video (which some people may not even see) hurt more than it could potentially help? My search terms don't seem to find such research, if it was done.

My assumption, however, is that there are plenty of people out there that will do it, and might look at the comments to see what others have discussed. And some just have to comment on everything.

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