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.
Add a “watch on YouTube” link above or below your embedded videos?
Don’t host on YouTube? They’re a big company, I’m sure they’ve got the resources for a couple of video files.
Then they need to find advertisers. This is the hard part. Advertisers are familiar with the platform and tools of YouTube, having them to submit ads in other platforms is where the for-profit video hosting becomes tricky
Get out of here with your logic!