YouTube Will Stop Emailing Subscribers About New Videos Next Week (9to5google.com) 39
A lot happens on YouTube, and the Google video site has for ages emailed subscribers that opted into alerts about new uploads and livestreams. YouTube is getting rid of these emails next week as very few people opened alerts about new videos from their inbox. From a report: The rationale is "less than 0.1% of these emails are opened," the company said. Messages about your "account, mandatory service announcements, etc." remain, with Google hoping that the broader change today will help "you more easily spot and pay attention to the important emails." It reflects companies increasingly wanting to reduce information overload.
Wait, what? (Score:4, Interesting)
It must be a trick. They're planning something, they must be!
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Considering Youtube sends out alerts if the app has permissions on devices, an email is superfluous. They already have ways to overload us with information.
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Interesting,
I'd have never considered YouTube (nor any other form of social media) as a reliable source of news and information.
I do see a number of opinion pieces there...pretty much exclusively that type of info.
Not that the MSM on TV is that much better, but I try to watch the main ones on TV (3 Networks, plus CNN, FOX and MSNBC)...between all of those they still have "some" simple news reporting amongst the opinion stuf
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Notifications have a different purpose. You might as well say your email inbox is superfluous if you get notifications on incoming emails. Notifications are now-focused and ephemeral. Email is easy to go back and refer to at your own convenience.
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These notifications are something you must specifically request to receive, and enabling this request is fairly well hidden. And is something that youtube has a weird tendency to still not send even if you request them every once in a while. For which they usually blame "bugs".
I guess this is them getting tired of their system not working properly, and in traditional google fashion, just axing the service entirely instead of trying to make it work properly.
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No I often don't actually "open" the emails, but, in my email apps, I can see a list of what's there and they usually have not only the subject, but also the first few lines of the message and from that I can see a new video I want to see from someone I've subscribed to and I go to my YouTube app and watch it.
I get the emails and pretty much read them without opening them, and will miss my notifications.
Is YouTube going to save money somehow by not doing this???
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Is YouTube going to save money somehow by not doing this???
Emails with low open rates probably get filtered to spam on other email providers. So if your Google account uses a Yahoo or Hotmail address, Google doesn't want ALL their emails going to spam. So they only want to send the ones that get opened.
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Well, even still, that doesn't answer if that will somehow save Google/YouTube any money....is email really that expensive to send out, even if unopened?
But also, it isn't like YT is only stopping sendi
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I guess I wasn't clear. It won't save them money, but there is still a "cost" to not doing this.
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No, it's not expense in sending, it's expense in everything else.
Knowing 99.9% of people don't open your email - why continue to send it? At least on paper, it means 999 out of 1000 people don't find it useful, and stuff that isn't useful shouldn't be continued. It does after all, cost Google money to maintain that feature as things change on the back end a
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Agree. I (used to) find the e-mail notifications valuable. But I never clicked the links. I would just visit YT and log in to see what was new from my subscribed channels. I know e-mail links are often tracked. I don't click them, if I don't have to, on purpose.
I suspect this is more about YT not wanting people to leave the website or app. E-mail notification means that you have left and they need to get your eyes back onto their screen. So, good job YT; you are likely cancelling a service that actually wor
Skewed statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
'Not opened' is not identical to 'not seen'.
With 90% of the e-mail messages, the subject line is enough information. Doesn't mean the mail was useless, per se.
Then again yes, fb, youtube and some others should consolidate their spam a bit.
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Exactly, I turned these emails on because sometimes new videos on certain channels didn't show up in my feed or get notified.
I hope they fixed that before turning them off.
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Yeah, I get SpaceX notifications and I don't bother to read, I type in their channel URL - this ain't hard.
Is YT assuming people can't set their own notifications? Or are they saving some money with that as an excuse?
Just use RSS (Score:2)
Subscriptions (Score:5, Insightful)
What I want to happen is, when I subscribe to a channel and they upload a new video, it should appear on my home page. I subscribed for a reason. I shouldn't need to hit a notification icon as well, because I subscribed for a reason. I also shouldn't have to go to my subscriptions tab to see them, I subscribed because I *want* to see their videos first. I don't want to see the hottest new music video first, because I don't care about them, and Youtube should know this, but they don't seem to. I also don't want to watch news videos about COVID, because I don't watch news videos, but for some reason that COVID topic is screwed into my homescreen ABOVE the stuff I do watch, no matter how many times I tell Youtube I don't want to see it.
So, great move on the email. Now fix the stuff I think more people care about than email, please.
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Citizen, you WILL watch what we recommend you.
We KNOW what's best for you.
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I subscribe for a different reason - I want to be able to find their stuff later on very easily. I don't want to be bombarded with everything they post. So I like that I can subscribe without being notified for every new post.
Maybe solution for your case would be the other way around, with a 'notification' direct click that would also add to you subscriptions & give you immediate notifications of new content posted.
Subject header is enough notification? (Score:1)
Google Knows I've Opened E-Mail? (Score:1)
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When you open a "tracked" email with MOST email clients, the images displayed are from links that tie back to that email. Any links within are also keyed back to the email.
The client I use lets me disable display of linked images, and even select which domains to accept links from. Most bulk mail trackers receive no feedback from me when I view their messages.
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0.1% is not really correct (Score:2)
While I support this change 100%, but to say that it's not needed because only X% opened the emails is not quite correct. I'm sure many many people got the emails, saw from the subject that so-and-so has a new video, and then opened the app/page. I know I've done it before.
Generally you didn't need to open the email get the needed information from it.
Mobile notifications suck (Score:2)
So... (Score:3)
FUCK OFF AND DIE GOOGLE.
A bunch of Monkeys locked in a basement could do a better job.
Hell with the bell (Score:2)
"Not opened..." (Score:2)
Most E-mail clients refuse to load remote content by default in messages when you read them to prevent just this, advertisers and spammers finding out that you opened the E-mail.
Since this is case, how can they assume their statistics about how many E-mails were opened are accurate? Also, with many such notification E-mails the subject line is enough to get the point across, so they can still be useful.
This sucks (Score:2)
These email notifications are a great feature that I use daily. I never miss a video from my favorite uploaders because each one is emailed to me, at least when Youtube isn't silently unsubcribing me. This lets me download the videos without going to their site and seeing ads and shitty recommendations which is probably the real reason they're doing this and also why I get unsubscribed. The emails also notify me immediately which as allowed me to download and watch videos that were quickly taken down for wh
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Top google result for "youtube rss": https://www.google.com/url?sa=... [google.com]
LrnToInternetPls
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Yeah I immediately googled it after posting the comment and found the same thing. It's still a pain in the ass to add a new subscription to RSS, it's like a 4 step process. And then I'll see them in my RSS reader later than I would in email so I'll likely miss out on removed ones. Come on Youtube, just leave it be!
Differing opinion (Score:2)
There are a handful of YouTubers that I follow. e.g. Primitive Technology [youtube.com], Baumgartner Restoration [youtube.com], and ClickSpring [youtube.com]. Seeing an email that they've posted something makes me giddy, and I leave them in my inbox as a queue to watch them later. I've watched every one of their videos, subscribed, upvoted, and turned on notifications.
So how many of those show up as recommendations for me? Zero. Nothing even remotely related. Putting it frankly, YouTube's suggested content feature sucks. Discontinuing the ema