Here’s why you can’t click the title to go back to YouTube on our videos.

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.

  • skulblaka@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    202·
    17 hours ago

    We won’t have a competitor until people start posting shit elsewhere and people won’t start posting shit elsewhere until we have a competitor with a solid user base.

    It’s a catch-22. I don’t disagree with you here but I also don’t see a good answer. Companies are going to post their news where an audience exists for that news and I have a hard time saying that that is wrong for them to do.