The moment when UX is traded for profit

The article by Jayden Milne about YouTube’s change in videos on its frontpage and it’s current HN thread made me think about the times a good User Interface and User Experience is traded for profit. Reading the comments on HN, it looks like everyone is dissatisfied and annoyed by the way YouTube is changing over the years. Important things are shorts, bad recommendations, ads, and of course the work against ad blockers like ublock. Back in the days, YouTube was a content platform. Nowadays, YouTube’s number 1 goal is to sell advertisement spots and show them to as many people as possible. Obviously, there’s some kind of conflict of objectives. They want the user’s to stay on the site, watch their favorite YouTubers for many hours and at the same time deliver ads and recommend videos the user inwardly doesn’t want to watch. Let them watch what they want is not as lucrative as if they showed the most ad-suitable content. Showing and recommending more ad-suitable content might lose users and clicks over time. There’s the typical balancing between two worlds.

When you think about why you (as a company) want to provide good UI and UX to your users and clients, it’s mostly to keep them on your site / product. You want to be better than competitors and sometimes a better UX is the tipping point, when too competitors provide the same service. One important thing that also almost hold is that you probably have paying customers. Your customer is the solely stakeholder you focus on. There’s no third party that might introduce conflicts of interest between each other. This is the reason why UX and UI is so important for such business models. Your customer is paying, you want to provide the best experience to the customer. If your customer is unsatisfied, you will lose him and his money.

YouTube, as a company need both, users and customers. Customers are companies that are paying for ads. The user is not the paying customer¹ and therefore the user experience is not made for the user to have a good time. The UX-team at YouTube is not deciding anything. The decisions for UI and UX are driven by the best statistics for the customers, aka to drive up profit.

YouTube already realized that they treading on thin ice. They scare users off which in turn loses customers. I think they’ve tried to get around this in recent years with YouTube Premium and direct channel support, but maybe they’re already past the tipping point and have too many users through their profit-driven focus on their ad-customers.

If you’re a dying business, great UI and UX won’t save you, but if you have a growing customer base, UX can be a game changer for customer satisfaction.