What Happened to Youtube?

I've grown to rely on Youtube, as I'm sure many people have. It's the first place I go to look for clips of half-forgotten movies, television shows, and commercials. The other day, after a couple of tries, I found the opening of CCTV's 1987 of "Dream of the Red Chamber" serial, one of the earliest pieces of media I can remember. However, the continued push to monetize Youtube has been making the site harder and harder to use.

A few weeks ago I noticed that many videos, especially older and less popular ones, weren't loading properly. The stream would stop after the first twenty seconds and then take a minute or two to resume. This happened repeatedly for a set of clips that were only a minute or two in length individually, effectively doubling the amount of time it took to watch them. Apparently this is a measure that was taken in order to reduce the load on Youtube's servers, which I understand the reasoning for, but why apply it to these shorter clips where loading the entire video wouldn't have that much impact? And since last year, users have been complaining that a video won't load completely if it's paused, so I had to wait out the buffering each time.

Then you have the ads. Youtube has been experimenting with banner, overlay, and in-video ads for a long time now, similar to the kind that you find on other video services like Hulu. I don't usually find them too much of a bother, but this morning I was looking up some old trailers, and discovered I had to watch a hefty two-minute ad before I could access a one-minute teaser trailer, lengthening that wait time to ridiculous extremes. And of course, the teaser is already an ad itself, for the movie it was made for. I understand that Youtube is a business that needs to make money to pay for the servers, and I'm willing to put up with some advertisements to an extent, but this was too much. And I'm certainly not the only one who feels this way.

There have been various programs and applications floating around for a while now that let you download and save videos from Youtube, but lately we've seen the rise of various browser extensions, tweaks, and add-ons designed to skip or block Youtube ads, to increase download speeds, and add more controls. Don't like the autoplay or the automatic annotations? There are scripts out there that can turn them off for you. Youtube Options and Youtube Center seem to be the most popular all-purpose Youtube tweakers at the moment. I haven't resorted to using any of these, but it's becoming more and more tempting as Youtube keeps adding hoops to jump through for access. And if there are more and more people like me, Youtube may be in trouble.

Youtube has been trying to shed its image as a free video portal for ages. They've been slowly adding more and more pay content, like the ability to rent streaming movies, and they'll be launching premium content soon in the spring. The trouble is that the majority of its users don't associate Youtube with pay content, the way they do with Hulu or Netflix. They associate it with amateur home movies and music video collections and endless user-submitted memes. They think of it as a free media resource that becomes less valuable the more restrictions are placed on content, and the more difficult its videos become to access. Users are far more resistant to the monetization of Youtube than they are with the sites that started out as pay sites, because they're used to being able to use the site in a certain way, and can become hostile and resentful if that option is taken away.

I sympathize with Youtube, because there's clearly a lot of potential for them to grow commercially. Youtube is the third highest ranked site on the internet in terms of traffic, and has become a part of the mainstream culture the way that few other sites have. Many people use it daily, myself included. However, there's a significant risk of Youtube alienating their user base if they push monetization too hard. Last year they ran more video ads than any other digital distribution service, but it's clear that fewer and fewer users have been willing to sit through them. The most popular browser extensions are all ad blockers and script tweakers that give users more control over what they see online.

Personally, I know Youtube isn't going to last in its current form if it doesn't make money, which is the biggest thing that's keeping me from trying to game the system myself. However, I can't help feeling frustrated every time Youtube makes me sit through an inane ad, or the videos won't load properly. Surely there are better alternatives than this?
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