YouTube can now terminate accounts that are “no longer commercially viable”

This is a good time to remind yourself and friends about Google Takeout (https://www.google.com/takeout)

Use it to backup all your Google data to your own computer, once a year at least.

As was brought up by markiplier recently this is extra scary because a ban here would ban you from Gmail, analytics, and any other Google service.

Could I be locked out of Gmail tomorrow for blocking an ad on a music video? It's not clear to me that the answer is no.

This commenter has it right; YT can't possibly be a money-maker: https://twitter.com/AlalmeCreative/status/119360740533606809...

Think about it. You can't even consider being a large video host without massive amounts of spare disk space, and you probably can't make enough on ads to pay just for bandwidth!

I bet that this is why the new terms of service clarify that YT is an offering of Google, and not of some wholly-owned subsidiary. Google's search ads make so much money that you can buy as many computers as you like in pursuit of ads, and then if you happen to use those computers for storing cat videos, well, that's just good use of idle disks!

An interesting development, particularly if you take it in concert with the “Adpocalypse” (ad companies forcing YouTube to remove their ads from any potentially controversial content). For example, most violent (i.e. Call of Duty) video game videos are immediately and irrevocably demonitized, to the point where the creators are only able to continue thanks to external funding, either through Twitch or Patreon.

Now then, those videos can still get tens and hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. They are the very definition of “not commercially viable” to YouTube, since they can’t have ads on them, but they’re extremely well viewed.

Makes you wonder what will happen next.

Wonder if they're considering mostly the bandwidth cost or the storage cost too?

Lets say a channel with videos does not get a lot of views, so takes up storage costing X, vs. a channel that get a lot of unmonetizable videos which take up bandwidth cost Y in addition to storage. Maybe bandwidth costs Y are much higher, so the former channels are safe?

Hopefully they give a long notice for the user to back those videos up, or there would be a lot of lost content.

If it's a great purge, it's going to be a huge mess with even Internet Archive teams and volunteers not able to keep up with the immense storage and bandwidth needed.

I am so happy I (mostly) stopped using Gmail a few years ago. I still have an email account there but it just forwards my old mail to my new fast mail address. I never log in.