Well they added this to their ToS about a year ago:
> Terminations by YouTube for Service Changes
> YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503851 for discussion)
Combine this with growing usage, this might make their projected costs much higher than expected
[0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/
That reminds me I should back up my youtube channel, I probably have videos on there that I don't have locally.
For the business products there may be strong business rationale behind it (it would categorically rule out too many applications), but for a consumer product I doubt that they don’t try making money both ways.
I don't like seeing things tied to advertising revenue. It's not comfortable from a privacy perspective, and it's certainly not competitive for other players wanting to enter the space without the dollars from Google's huge advertising funnel/marketplace/ecosystem.
You'll notice Google also started to clamp down on Gmail trash storage space, and I'll bet they're going to place more limits on Drive and unused accounts.
I wonder if this is antitrust driven? Or are they hurting for space? We haven't seen this crop up on Youtube, where I bet they're really parched for disk space.
Will Google start deleting YouTube content that is super long tail and unviewed?