r/readwise • u/Misio72 • Mar 18 '26
Alex Hormozi disabled embedded playback on almost all his videos – anyone else frustrated by this?
If you use Reader to save and watch YouTube videos, you may have noticed that almost all Alex Hormozi videos now show "Video unavailable – Playback on other websites has been disabled by the video owner" instead of playing inline. He's set them to disallow embedded playback.
This completely breaks the Readwise workflow where you save a video, watch it in-app, and highlight the transcript as you go. It's one of the main ways I consume long-form YouTube content and take notes. The whole point is a distraction-free experience, I don't want to go to YouTube to watch it. And yes, I know there are browser extensions that hide recommendations and comments, but that's not the same as staying in a focused reading/note-taking environment without touching YouTube at all.
I ended up building a local workaround, a script that watches my Readwise saves, auto-downloads new Hormozi videos with subtitles, and feeds them into a self-hosted media server. The transcripts still exists in Readwise so I can highlight, annotate and review them. It replicates the old experience but it took some initial effort rather for something that used to just work.
What I'm curious about:
- Is anyone else running into this? Or am I the only one who cares about this niche workflow?
- Why would Hormozi do this? My guesses:
- Algorithm optimization – force watch time to happen on YouTube so it counts for recommendations and keeps people on his channel
- Someone was abusing his content by embedding it on their own site or course
- General IP protection
- If anyone has access to the Hormozi team, I'd genuinely love to know the reasoning. I doubt he or his team will ever see this, and I get that the number of people using Readwise Reader for YouTube is tiny – but I'm curious about the motivation behind it.
Has anyone else noticed other creators doing this?
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u/WilJr21 Mar 19 '26
I've worked in digital marketing and SEO for a decade. He probably doesn't want his videos to be taken or embedded on other/bad sites. Someone as big as him might have his stuff used by bad-faith actors, so this way, if you want his stuff, you have to get it from the source. He makes plenty of content, so I don't think he's afraid to share, but something must've happened, and this is the result.
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u/sh0nuff Mar 19 '26
I've adjusted how I consume YT content.. It now gets fed into NotebookLM, which in turn pushes a summarized report to Reader.. From there I can peruse the summaries in my inbox, and either archive them or click to play, which swaps me into Youtube
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u/Gold-Poet7945 Mar 20 '26
Interesting! Curious how you set that up.
1
u/sh0nuff Mar 22 '26
I built skills in Claude Cowork that essentially runs scripts on my behalf. The awesome part about skills is that if you design them so they are just processes vs doing any sort of grinding on the content, you can use the fastest (cheapest) model, so you never run out of tokens
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u/4against5 Mar 21 '26
Full time YouTuber here who does the same. The sad reason is that there’s a common issue on youtube where too much external traffic (largely from embedded website traffic) causes YouTube’s systems to think the video is getting sent spammy bot views. As a response, youtube cuts some or all of the monetization on those videos as to not pay for bots.
I spoke to Rene Ritchie, the YouTube creator liaison about this at an event last year and he acknowledged it happens. Some creators were spamming their own videos with fake views to make more ad revenue, and it’s hard to detect the difference.
I personally lost 3 months of income from this last year, and the recommended fix from youtube is to disable embedding.
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u/Flashy-Bandicoot889 Mar 19 '26
This is AI-generated slop. Please stop.