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Comment by justforfunhere | Hacker News Reader

How does one become "no longer commercially viable" for youtube?

I've seen channels with 1000's of videos automatically uploaded by someone's dashcam, all with 0 views. I'm certain there are more cases where a user uploads tons of videos that never get watched.

Adblockers.

This doesn't make sense. Anyone can watch YouTube without an account. So even if they terminated a consumer using adblocking it wouldn't change anything for Google. This is likely targeted at users publishing a lot of low quality video that get few views. If they enforce this my guess is we see backlash around free speech and the like. This seems like a perfect way for Google to curate "good" content in the eyes of themselves and potentially at the downside of people speaking out against Google, their products or videos promoting a competitive alternative. Google could deem things "not commercially viable" for almost any reason. It appears to have the advantage of being a perfect scapegoat.

> This doesn't make sense. Anyone can watch YouTube without an account. So even if they terminated a consumer using adblocking it wouldn't change anything for Google.

there are means to identify (and block) unique users without them needing to have an account. Heck, there's even means to identify the usage of an ad-blocker and/or youtube-dl and to refuse to provide the video for such cases.

I see the point but that's a cat and mouse game. Google would invest far more resources to block those users than it was worth.

Yes. But if they deal with the low-hanging fruits, this change on TOS means that they have covered their asses when the banned people start complaining

like manifest V3

Does it matter though ? You don't need an account to watch video afaik.

No. Not now. But that could change.

I don't think this will change. Yes, they already require an account for the YT app. But if they block access altogether without an account then they also break all youtube links for unregistered users, motivating people to find alternatives for sharing accessible video links online. I doubt Google wants to take that risk.

I hope it won't change. But they can make watching without an account less desirable; less bandwidth, more ads, no access to newly uploaded videos, first 30s. free, etc.

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