YouTube’s Related Videos Growth Hack Backfire

YouTube has an annoying “suggested videos” popup whenever you try to pause an embedded video.  They do this to drive traffic to the YouTube website, but it results in an absolute dogshit user experience.  This is an example of how an overly greedy growth hack can backfire.

It all comes down to money.  YouTube does not have pre-roll or mid-roll ads on embedded videos, so they cannot monetize those views.  The only way they can make money on embedded video views is if they trick the user into clicking through and visiting the YouTube website or app.  By implementing suggested video popups on embedded videos, YouTube is prioritizing ad revenue over positive user experience.

Let’s say you’re following along on a coding tutorial and you need to pause the video to read the screen.  As soon as you do so, you’re slapped with this massive popup covering the entire screen and must x-out of it to view the video contents.  This gets very annoying.

As you can see, the “more videos” widget covers all of the crucial information that the user paused the video to see.

Furthermore, this greatly discourages companies from using YouTube to embed videos on their company sites.  It makes complete sense for a company to want to have a presence on YouTube as it essentially monopolizes the video landscape online and can be viewed as a necessary social media profile.  However, no company would want other videos popping up on their website when visitors are watching their embedded videos.

There is no setting you can change to prevent this from happening.  The website creator has to modify the embed code URL to include ?rel=0.  However, most websites, like reddit, don’t make this modification and the user can’t do anything about it.

All things considered, it is excessively greedy of YouTube to hinder user experience to force website visits.  Related videos should be turned off by default, but at the very least YouTube should make it easy to disable them.  By removing them completely, YouTube will make a much better user experience for those watching embedded videos.  The related videos get so many misclicks that removing this dumb feature will actually lower YouTube’s bounce rate.