7:01 a.m. December 13, 2024
Sometimes I wonder if YouTube as a video-hosting platform is getting dangerously close to jumping the shark. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with YouTube. It’s also a huge organization and dominates the world of online video. It seems like it is too big to fail. However, there are a lot of small annoyances and patterns that make me wonder if it is on a path to jumping the shark.
For one thing, the copyright issue. As a small YouTuber, I have to think about music copyright all the time. I can’t go anywhere in the world where music is playing. Large companies can afford to use popular music and pay the royalties. But normal people can’t do that. And the YouTube computers will pick up on even the tiniest fragment of a melody that is playing so far in the background of a video that the human ear can’t even make it out. Yet, the computer attaches that melody to a copyrighted song, and your video is claimed by some kind of wealthy corporation as now belonging to them. It’s just annoying.
Recently, I’ve been hit with copyright claims because of some classical music I included in videos long ago. My understanding is that classical music is not copyrighted. That music can be centuries old, and the copyright expired long ago. However, there is a loophole here in that a particular version of that piece of music as played by a particular symphony orchestra CAN be copyrighted. So if the YouTube supercomputers decide that this piece of Mozart was played on a particular night by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, it is copyrighted. The music itself is not, but that performance of the music IS copyrighted.
Advertising is also becoming overwhelming on YouTube. There seem to be more and more ads in the videos and even around them. I noticed recently that now when you pause a video, an ad appears. Pausing a video will trigger an action whereby the video gets reduced in size and moved to the left half of the screen and the right half of the screen fills with an ad. This happens even if you are watching the YouTube video in full screen mode. It feels like YouTube has entire departments whose only job is to sit around and think about ways to cram in as many ads as possible. It feels like this path towards inserting so many ads is leading to a situation where videos become unwatchable on YouTube. And that leaves the market open to competitors.
I think we’ve all seen this happen in the past. Facebook seemed untouchable. Yet, Facebook has become so complex and so impersonal and so bloated and so confusing and so corporate that I never use it anymore. I hardly know anyone that does.
I also wonder if the barrier to entry and the corporate competition is now so great that regular people simply won’t start YouTube channels anymore. YouTube appears to be on a path to becoming practically the same thing as a network TV station. My YouTube feed is practically a clip show of the content you already see on regular TV. You can watch The Daily Show or an episode of Yellowstone on regular TV or a streaming service. And now you can watch clips and highlights from those shows on YouTube.
Perhaps I’m overstating this. It’s just a feeling I have that YouTube is moving in a direction away from its roots as a video platform for regular people.