YouTube is cracking down on external links in videos

Its about time. The Youtube UI has become a disaster over the last few years. It all started with the ability to let uploaders "annotate" their videos. I've disabled the setting to show annotations probably a dozen times and they keep coming back. I can't figure out if the setting is poorly implemented or if youtube is deliberately switching the setting back.

An important note here, if you cannot enable monetize videos, YouTube will not allow you to link to patreon or other sites.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;byCxnAj.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;byCxnAj.jpg</a><p>Its not enough for Google to ban you from ads, they have decided to cut off any other funding source aswell...

YouTube still hasn&#x27;t stopped the hordes of fake accounts that spam every top creator&#x27;s new videos.<p>Ex. PewDiePie video has a dozen comments from fake PewDiePie accounts (name, avatar) posting about &quot;contest&quot; link.

From the article it sounds like it&#x27;s more cracking down on people who rip off other people&#x27;s content and then use the link cards to get referral traffic to their own properties.<p>I don&#x27;t think legitimate creators need to be concerned. From the article, the minimum requirement to be a partner is 10K public views. That&#x27;s a relatively low bar, and you shouldn&#x27;t be trying to be monetize when you have that low of a view count anyway.

Considering the crap ratio in these obnoxious end-of-video links and the fact that external links in the video description (e.g. to point to additional information) are still allowed, I don&#x27;t think this is a bad thing.<p>I&#x27;d probably prefer it if the same rules applied to anyone though.

Google is cracking down on links in their search results too, using AMP.

Was youtube always tracking links in Video description? I dont remember ever noticing it, spotted it yesterday, every non google link is redirected with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;redirect?redir_token=blabla+urlencoded" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;redirect?redir_token=blabla+urlencod...</a> link+video title

You know what I want YouTube to &quot;crack&quot; on? Assholes that say &quot;But, what do you guys think? Let me know in the comments section bellow.&quot; Any video of those should be immediately demonetized.<p>This is a half serious rant, but seriously, video quality has gone so low over the last few years. There is practically a format that all those &quot;professional&quot; assholes follow. Does it really help them get more cash?