YouTube can terminate anyone they deem “not commercially viable” | Hacker News Reader

YouTube can terminate anyone they deem “not commercially viable”

reddit.com

35 pointsbluefreeze15 comments

For what it's worth, the terms and conditions in other Google products such as Chrome, Chrome OS, and Android Studio already include similar language. I don't believe this clause was added specifically for YouTube.

[1] Google Chrome Terms of Service - 12.2 Google may at any time, terminate its legal agreement with you if ... (E) the provision of the Services to you by Google is, in Google’s opinion, no longer commercially viable. https://www.google.com/intl/en_sg/chrome/privacy/eula_text.h...

[2] Google Chrome OS Terms - 11.2 Google may at any time, terminate its legal agreement with you if ... (E) the provision of the Software or Services to you by Google is, in Google’s opinion, no longer commercially viable. https://www.google.com/chromebook/termsofservice.html

[3] Android Software Development Kit License Agreement - 9.3 Google may at any time, terminate the License Agreement with you if ... (D) Google decides to no longer provide the SDK or certain parts of the SDK to users in the country in which you are resident or from which you use the service, or the provision of the SDK or certain SDK services to you by Google is, in Google's sole discretion, no longer commercially viable. https://developer.android.com/studio/terms

To me this means that Google are within their rights to remove access to a system that THEY deem to be not commercially viable.

Rather than "hey, you're not making us any money, you can no longer access Youtube" it's more "hey, this service we're offering you is costing us more to run than we make out of it, so we're going to shut it down".

People are reading this wrong IMHO.

https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1193988444873060352

> The section of our Terms that you're referring to is not about terminating an account if it’s not making enough money – it's about discontinuing certain YouTube features or parts of the service, e.g. removing outdated/low usage features. This does not impact anyone in new ways!

Told ya.

So, Does this mean that the YouTube has a clause to ban your account if you are using ad blocker? I would say that a person with numerous subscriptions and watches YouTube daily (non ad block user) would be considered commercially viable.

Accounts are free and if you are not uploading completely unnecessary. You can still access the RSS feeds for each channel regardless if you have an account or not.

Someone recently [1] got his Google account (think Gmail, Docs, etc) banned for watching YouTube without ads via some Android app.

[1] https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/2723

Upd: added link

Source?

It was posted here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21247759

That was never verified.

I see this in the current (local, can't figure out how to see English/US version) terms already.

It's not really clear on what The Service is, is it youtube of all of google services?

Isn't Youtube still unprofitable? It always seemed too good to be true to let everyone upload their petabytes of useless videos that receive 3 views and never generate any revenue for anyone.

Maybe the days of free storage are just ending.

If you got to make money, you got to make money - Thats okay.

Major worry here being if I dont be a "money earning user" for Youtube i.e. I have ad blocker and I do not monetize / upload videos, will I lose access to ALL my Google products? (All being analytics, webmaster tools, gmail being 3 main ones)

I don't think there's any problem here.

Nothing lives forever and YT is not PG&E, it may shutdown and never return. Similar things happened before, e.g., MSN Spaces, myspaces, etc.

It's actually a good thing to say this upfront.

I think this is not about the service shutting down.

It’s about the service terminating accounts for selected unprofitable users only.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com