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Comment by encody | Hacker News Reader

Wait, so the Verge is upset that the PfP player removed a link that would take the user to the video on YouTube. But if they use the normal YouTube player that has the link, the Verge gets less ad $. But the users who click the link would be watching on YouTube, where again, the Verge would be earning less ad $.

Am I understanding this correctly? Because it sounds like the Verge is complaining about a change that should net them marginally more(?) ad $ (and is to YouTube's disadvantage) because a few readers complained, and they're just trying to blame YouTube instead.

I'm confused.

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They're not trying to blame YouTube, they are squarely pointing out the absolute truth that YouTube is to blame.

It's YouTube's choice to do whatever they like with their own product, but the reason what they've chosen to do is problematic is:

1. It's yet another bait'n'switch

2. It is shady as fuck to not only make no announcement about the change, but make it difficult to even figure out what's happened

In short; yes it's Google's prerogative to be a bag of dicks, but let's not pretend that's not exactly what they are (continuing to be)

>2. It is shady as fuck to not only make no announcement about the change, but make it difficult to even figure out what's happened

Source for this claim? The article doesn't make this accusation, and considering this is a B2B product that requires manual approval to use, I wouldn't be surprised if they sent out this as email rather than something to their blog. Searching for "YouTube Player for Publishers", it looks like their last mention of that product was in 2018, and it was only a passing mention.

It's literally the title of the article: "YouTube quietly made some of its web embeds worse, including ours"

Seems like a stretch to extrapolate from one word in the title (ie. "quietly") to "shady as fuck to not only make no announcement about the change, but make it difficult to even figure out what's happened". The article even mentions that the author was not involved in discussions between the publisher and youtube[1]. This is like some engineer complaining about how AWS "silently" changed their enterprise terms, when he's not even in meetings between his company and the AWS account rep.

[1] >(I didn’t even really know about it until this links kerfuffle — if you listen to The Vergecast this week, you know our newsroom is firewalled from the business side of our company.)

I honestly don't understand how you came to that conclusion, considering the following from TFA (emphasis mine):

> 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*

YouTube made the B2B product worse, and in order to get that functionality back (for now), the Verge would have to take a pay cut

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