For about a year, I’ve gotten notes from readers asking why our YouTube embeds are broken in one very specific way: you can no longer click the title to open the video on YouTube.com or in the YouTube app. This used to work just fine, but now you can’t.
This bothers us too, and it’s doubly frustrating because everyone assumes that we’ve chosen to disable links, which makes a certain kind of sense — after all, why on earth wouldn’t YouTube want people to click over to its app?
The short answer is money. 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.
I know this because I’ve spent months chasing down the mystery of the broken links, and after tons of back and forth between Vox Media’s teams and YouTube, and even me pushing this up to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, they’re not going to change it.
Here’s the really long version: like everyone, we publish our videos on YouTube. But YouTube isn’t the same for everyone. Publishers like Vox Media can use something called the YouTube Player for Publishers, or PfP, which has been around since 2016 and basically competes with the wacky custom video players you see on so many other sites. It allows publishers to sell their own ads at higher rates while still having the videos live in the YouTube ecosystem, which is a nice win-win and not something anyone had to think about until earlier this year. (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.)
But around the beginning of this year, YouTube decided to change PfP and remove all of its branding from the publisher player. And “branding,” according to YouTube, includes that title link back to YouTube. If publishers want that link back to YouTube, they have to use the standard YouTube player — and give up their ad revenue and control to YouTube. That’s why so many YouTube players around the web — not just ours — don’t have links that work, even though they otherwise look and behave just like YouTube’s standard player.
Here’s what YouTube spokesperson Mariana De Felice told me about it: “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.”
I am a real brat and have complained about this for months now, but that’s the situation. Our choices are basically leaving things alone, making less money to have the link work, or switching to some other player on the site in protest, which would also not have a link back to YouTube but would at least let us pretend there’s market competition in video players.
Ultimately our business side will make the call, but that’s why the link is broken — a tiny example of the modern platform internet that tells a huge story about how everything else works.
