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Here's why YouTube videos in articles aren't working the way you expect
- YouTube has degraded the user experience on some player embeds.
- These affected embedded players no longer let you click on the title link to have the video open on YouTube or the app.
- The company reportedly made this decision to protect its partners and advertisers.
When watching a YouTube video embedded on a different website, you can usually click on the title to open the video on YouTube or in the app. If you’ve recently noticed that this link does not work on videos in articles, you’re not imagining things. In fact, it appears there’s a reason why this link has stopped working on some websites.
The folks over at The Verge have solved the mystery behind this problem. It appears the issue is linked to the type of player a website uses and YouTube wanting to protect its money.
For context, websites have a choice over what type of YouTube player they want to use when they embed a video. There’s the standard player and then there’s the YouTube Player for Publishers (PfP), which has been around since 2016. The main difference is that the PfP allows a website to sell its own ads at higher rates while the standard player cedes this control to YouTube. Outside of that, the two players are nearly identical in look and function.
According to the outlet, around the beginning of the year, YouTube made a change to the PfP that removed all of its branding from the player. Along with the branding, the company also removed the link back to YouTube.
In a statement to the publication, YouTube spokesperson Mariana De Felice stated:
News publishers can choose between the standard YouTube embedded player or a version designed specifically for them, which gives greater control over the ads experience, but removes YouTube branding and links back to YouTube. This version provides publishers greater control over the ads running on their videos, but YouTube doesn’t have visibility into which ads are served. In order to protect our advertisers and partners, we’ve removed our branding and links back to YouTube from the player.
In short, YouTube wants to run its own ads on these videos. Of course, publishers could just start using the standard player to fix this, but that also means taking less ad revenue. Although this is a dispute between publishers and YouTube, this also affects users.
There are a variety of reasons why you might want to have an embedded video open on YouTube. For example, you may want to use the “Watch later” feature to save it for when you have some free time. This feature is not available in the PfP player, but it is in the standard player.
It’s unfortunate that YouTube has removed this functionality, especially when the ability to link back to YouTube existed until this year.