Lightweight YouTube Embed Replacement

Drop-in open-source library that replaces YouTube iframes with a lighter-weight, privacy-respecting embed. Reduces page load significantly while still allowing video viewing. Target: web developers, publishers, privacy-conscious websites.

Core Web Vitals pressure and GDPR enforcement have made third-party iframe bloat a real liability for publishers, so demand for this pattern is genuine right now — lite-youtube-embed and Paul Irish's vanilla implementation already exist as open-source references with thousands of GitHub stars, meaning the technical concept is proven but also already partially solved for free. Monetizing a drop-in library is the hard part: the $1k–5k/mo band implies a hosted or managed layer (analytics dashboard, CDN, consent integration) rather than the library itself, which is realistically a freemium play at best. The biggest risk is that the core utility is a 30-line script most developers will just copy-paste from a blog post, leaving almost no surface area to charge for.