14 DAY TRIAL // One interesting aspect about the web is that for every successful venture there is a myriad of others that pop up around it. Some are obvious copies, some just try to cash in on someone else's success, but some actually provide a useful service extending the functionality of the original one. This is made easy by the APIs that many Internet services provide, some like Twitter making them a central piece of their strategy. The problem with APIs, though, is that when you depend on them, you're basically at the mercy of the company behind them, as one startup using YouTube's APIs, Totlol, found out and painfully so.
Totlol is a video site aimed at children. It uses videos from YouTube which are filtered and curated by the parents in order to provide the kids with content appropriate for their age. It managed to gain a decent following, but a change in the YouTube API Terms of Service (ToS) forced its creator, Ron Ilan, to shut down the free, ad-supported version of the site, and offer only a subscription-based one.
Now, Ilan is claiming that YouTube made the changes in direct response to his site and that Google's intentions were clearly aimed at preventing Totlol from achieving too much success and potentially at YouTube launching a similar feature at some point. What's more, he claims that this was a deliberate move and that YouTube is actively monitoring the success of its API users and then undermines their efforts in order to come up with a similar component as part of the proper site.
He bases his claims on the fact that YouTube made the changes to the ToS very shortly after he spoke to several representatives of the site, leading him to suspect foul play. "When the YouTube API team saw Totlol they liked it. At about the same time someone else at Google saw it, realized the potential it, and/or similar implementations may have, and initiated a ToS modification. An instruction was given to delay public acknowledgement of Totlol until the modified ToS where published. Later an instruction was given to avoid public acknowledgement at all," Ilan writes in his lengthy post.
The ToS now prohibits sites that use YouTube content as the main part of their service without providing much additional content from using it for "the sale of advertising, sponsorships, or promotions on any page of the API Client" without prior consent from YouTube. This affected Totlol directly, as its advertising was the main form of revenue for the site. Ilan claims that, despite talks with YouTube, the site hasn't responded to his request for authorization to run ads.
YouTube has issued a response to the allegations claiming that there is no relation between the ToS change and Totlol. "Updates to our API Terms of Service generally take months of preparation and review and are pushed out primarily to better serve our users, partners and developers. When new Terms of Service are ready, we notify our developers through as many channels as possible, including on our developer blog," a YouTube spokesperson stated. The fact remains that Ilan can't really prove his claims and the truth may be somewhere in the middle. And it doesn't change the fact that, at the end of the day, Totlol can only operate on a subscription model something which its creator says prevents it from breakthrough success.