Why is watching videos via youtube members only?

I can go onto youtube right now and watch your videos, so your simply charging people for the convenience of not switching tabs and searching "X quicklook", are we really that desperate? If you want me to subscribe, make it worth my while, doing things like this just makes me think your scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Maybe read the FAQ first dogg.

Youtube and why is it a member only feature?

Members also have the option to use the youtube player for our original content. This is a member only feature since we can't display preroll ads on Youtube. Trailers (which would be marked as duplicate content) and locked premium videos are not available on Youtube.

The official reason for YouTube being subscriber only according to Jeff is as follows:

It’s one of those weird “we get 100% of the ad money from our player but not from YouTube” things. There’s some talk about making some changes to the ad stuff on our YouTube channel, and if that happens we may end up revisiting that restriction. But that’s a lot of ifs and I’m not really in that conversation, so I don’t really know where it’s at right now.

I think there’s a case to be made for going all YouTube all the time, but I ain’t no businessman.