Comment by yupyupyups

>every other fuckass blog with 0.5 daily visitors was behind Cloudflare

Lol, that's so true.

>Google wants to be the only entity with unrestricted access to their catalog of other people's content,

Yeah, data is money. Reddit are doing the same thing, but even more aggressively. You want API access? Pay an astronomical amount of money for it, that is other people's content. Reddit also hosts a much small amount of media relative to YT.

For YT, I'm not so sure the increase in traffic is a drop in the bucket for them. It can depend a lot on which videos are being fetched. Cheap storage is cheap only for storing a large amount of data, not doing an unusual amount of (random) access.

Who knows.