YouTube

YouTube, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, is a global video-sharing platform and one of the most visited websites in the world. Acquired by Google in 2006, YouTube has since become the dominant platform for sharing videos on the internet.

YouTube's business model is built around advertising revenue, with creators earning money through ad views, subscriptions, and other monetization options. The platform hosts a wide range of content, including music videos, tutorials, news, video logs ("vlogs"), and live streams. YouTube has also begun offering subscription services, such as YouTube Premium and YouTube TV, for ad-free experiences, exclusive content, and live television.

YouTube has faced criticism and regulatory scrutiny on multiple fronts. Concerns have been raised about content moderation policies, the platform's role in the spread of misinformation, and its impact on user privacy, particularly in relation to data collection practices. Additionally, YouTube has been under fire for its algorithms, which some argue promote harmful or divisive content to maximize engagement.

• User freedom: Questionable; rampant bots and Elsagate suggest negligent moderation.
• User privacy: Poor; Since August 2025, accessing mature content without identification is a gamble. User data is also sold to advertisers and the site is owned by Google.
• Business model: Excessive advertising, YouTube Premium, YouTube Premium Lite
• Market competition: Despite several platforms that follow its niche, such as Odysee, PeerTube, and DailyMotion, they provide no significant competition.

Main article: Elsagate

The first "Elsagate" incident arose sometime during the mid-2010s on YouTube, though it was not discovered and named until 2016. It has since been used as a catch-all term for content that appears child-friendly at first glance but, in actuality, contains suggestive or outright illicit material targeted at minors. This is accomplished by using major intellectual properties for children, such as the Elsa character from the 2013 Disney film Frozen and Minecraft.

Although the problem is not unique to the YouTube platform, its dominance in the video sphere makes it an attractive target.

Main article: YouTube age verification

On 30 July 2025, in response to the UK Online Safety Act, YouTube announced a verification update that asks for either a government-issued ID, a photo, or credit card, otherwise they could not access content.^[1]

YouTube will estimate the age of a user from various sources, including the videos watched, and will ask for previously mentioned personal information when it believes that the user falls below 18.

Main article: Advertising overload

Advertisements are YouTube's primary source of revenue.^[2] This has led to advertisements becoming more pervasive on the platform^[3] such as an increasing number of spaces for static ads, longer ad breaks (which some users have documented being longer than the videos they watch^[4][5] and most prevalent on YouTube TV^[6]), increased ad frequency in videos,^[7] and poorer quality ads.^[8][9][10] Practices are also put into place in order to force non-paying users into seeing these ads as well, such as subscription-gating playing videos in the background.^[11]

Furthermore, even if a user pays for YouTube premium, they do not necessarily receive an ad-free experience^[12] — they may still see ads within the video they watch, such as sponsored segments.^[13] YouTube has added a "skip" feature, but it has been reported that this does not work consistently.^[14]

A common phenomenon on YouTube's advertisements is content that is mature and/or malicious in nature.^[15][16] The content of these advertisements include pornography,^[17][16] false advertising,^[8][9][10] scams,^[18][19][20] and far more. Rather than working towards clearing these ads, or acknowledging this advertising content that has been harming consumers on the platform, YouTube moderation has only cut the revenue for these videos that attempt to call out these ads,^[21] which has been known to make said videos be less-showcased.^[22][23]

Since at least 2016, YouTube has had an extensive record of censoring content that is demonetized.^[22][23] Within understandable circumstances, legitimately malicious or offensive videos would be demonetized and should not be shown on the platform; however, how videos are considered to be demonetized has had a harmful impact upon both viewers and content creators. Transgender creators on YouTube, for example, have experienced unfair censorship via demonetization since 2018.^[24] Content creators affected by this unfairly balanced moderation via algorithms^[25] have dubbed these events as "adpocalypses".^[26]

When YouTube integrated the ability to take down videos via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), they decided to often handle take-down requests in an automated manner.^[27] This automation has led to an excess in fraudulent DMCA take-downs of content,^[28][29] even going so far as to have Bungie call out YouTube in a legal case for their negligence.^[30][31] These take-down requests have ranged from users impersonating corporations, to users impersonating other users.^[27]

The prevalence of advertising on the platform, coupled with the repeated appearance of harmful and deceptive ads within YouTube's advertising system, led a significant number of users to employ ad-blocking tools to facilitate their viewing experience.

In response, Google initiated technical countermeasures to limit the functionality of these tools. This has resulted in an ongoing cycle where ad-blocker developers adapt to new restrictions, and the platform subsequently implements further detection methods. A key strategy in this effort involves the implementation of advanced code integrity checks designed to ensure ad content is delivered to viewers.

However, these measures typically exhibit limited efficacy before ad-blocking tools develop new methods of circumvention,^[32][33][34] a dynamic that some analysts suggest exemplifies the Streisand effect.^[35][36]

Additional strategies have involved the integration of advertisements directly into video streams. This approach has impaired the functionality of certain browser extensions, including SponsorBlock, a community-driven tool designed to skip sponsored segments within videos. The extension relies on user-submitted timestamps to identify these segments; its effectiveness is significantly reduced when personalized advertisements, which vary in duration and placement for each viewer, are embedded into the stream itself.^[37]

Google has publicly acknowledged implementing code that degrades the user experience for individuals using ad blockers. This includes introducing artificial latency, which has been documented to slow page load times, a measure that also affected users of the Firefox browser.^[38][39]

The YouTube Mobile application permits users with a YouTube Premium subscription to download videos for offline viewing. However, the downloaded content is protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) that requires the application to establish an online connection with YouTube's servers at least once every 48 hours to maintain playback functionality. This requirement is not prominently featured on the primary YouTube Premium marketing page and is detailed instead within the platform's support documentation.^[40][41]

Saved videos are forcibly deleted after 29 days. Data lock-in and proprietary encoding prevents the user from making permanent copies of videos, even those licensed under Creative Commons.^[42][43]

YouTube on TV is an HTML5 web interface from Google to allow supported devices — such as game consoles which do not have a native YouTube app — to view content via YouTube. An A/B experiment has begun which protects all video and audio content regardless of bit-rate or format via the YouTube on TV platform with DRM.^[44] A number of content creators license their work uploaded to YouTube via the Creative Commons licenses. The universal implementation of DRM to restrict a user's ability to exercise their rights granted by the license is a violation of the aforementioned licenses.^[45]

Another premium feature of the YouTube mobile app is the ability to play videos in the background.^[40] Without a premium subscription, neither the app nor a web browser will play YouTube videos in the background. However, the default HTML5 video player supports this with no extra effort needed from the developer.

On 7 February 2026, it was reported that YouTube Music was testing a feature that would paywall song lyrics, which were previously a free feature since 2020.^[46]

On 10 November 2021, YouTube removed the public dislike count from all of its videos. Creators are still be able to view dislike counts on their videos through the YouTube Studio website and app.^[47]

According to YouTube, this was implemented after user testing revealed that users were less likely to feel incentivized to actively try and manipulate the dislike count on videos if the dislike count was not visible to them.^[47] This spurred the creation of "Return YouTube Dislike" by Dmitry Selivanov, a third-party web browser extension to expose the dislike count again. YouTube discontinued the related API, upon which the extension relied, on 13 December 2021. From thereon "Return YouTube Dislike" switched "to using a combination of archived dislike stats, estimates extrapolated from extension user data and estimates based on view/like ratios for videos whose dislikes weren't archived and for outdated dislike archives."^[48]

YouTube's algorithm was engineered to make the user watch more videos than they intended, to earn more ad revenue.^[49] This is on top of a feature called Autoplay, which queues another video (chosen by Youtube's algorithm) and plays that automatically after a short delay so you keep watching more. Through this mechanism, children will especially have their attention extracted for several hours.^[50]

By default, this feature is enabled.^[51]

Since the beginning of 2025, users have been reporting issues with third-party front-ends accessing the platform.^[52] For FreeTube, there has been a heightened amount of people receiving 403 errors associated with IP blocks when attempting to view videos via this front-end.^[53]

YouTube is testing an experiment on Shorts content that enhances a video's detail without the creator's consent.^[54] The resulting output tends to look plastic. This change has been observed as early as 27 June 2025^[55] and affects creators who especially intend the video to be viewed in a certain way, such as the "VHS look".^[56] Rhett Shull, in his video, opines such a change "will inevitably erode viewers trust in my content [...] or any of the other creators on this platform that we all watch and we all follow" due to implications that the creator may be using AI, and "also erodes my trust in the platform."^[57]

Artist Sam Yang uploaded a video on 30 August 2025, following up on the issue using his own work for comparison, testing the claims that this is merely compression scaling, adding an artist's eye and commentary to the issue.^[58]

Users also complained about a dangerous flickering that happens under some videos. Some forwarded this issue to YouTube scientist Anton Petrov, to which he replicated the issue and showed it under a video uploaded 25 October 2025, noting it happens on one of his devices, more specifically a mobile phone.^[59]

In November 2025, multiple YouTube channels, including Enderman, Scratchit Gaming, and 4096 were reportedly terminated in a massive ban wave under false reasons, such as association with a Japanese-language channel "椛のスターレイル遊び" which translates roughly as "Momiji plays Honkai: Star Rail Adventures," a reference to a Japanese role-playing game. Some have blamed the ban wave on the malfunctions of YouTube's AI-powered moderation system.^[60]

In June 2023, YouTube forced Matt Wright, maintainer of the YouTube Metadata tool, to remove the exporting feature which let people export YouTube metadata such as video descriptions into a file. This did not include the videos themselves. It can be assumed that this is the "tip of an iceberg" and YouTube made many such requests without them being publicly documented.^[61]