A report by Vidmeter.com contradicts the idea that YouTube became a billion dollar property only because of copyright infringing videos posted there by its users. Vidmeter’s three-month study found only about nine percent of the most-viewed videos on YouTube were removed at the request of copyright holders. Those removed clips, most of which were music videos, picked up less than six percent of all views for the period.
Out of Vidmeter’s sample, 72 of the videos were removed at the request of Viacom, which has sued Google over YouTube’s failure to keep copyrighted works off the site. Internet business blogger Henry Blodget suggested “Google/YouTube had a lot more leverage in the YouTube-Big Media negotiations than was commonly thought,” since so little copyrighted content was found consistently by Vidmeter in YouTube’s most viewed videos.
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[...] Vidmeter.com Contradicts YouTube [...]
Jason: the report mentions that it does not account for unremoved videos, but uses removed videos to show an “estimate” for the popularity of copyrighted videos. I think the moral of the report is that Viacom’s $1B is way too much.
This report is just wrong. They only looked at removed videos, and — as everyone knows — YouTube is not removing most of the offending videos. This means most of the offending videos are not counted.
This data is trying to fight the nagetive press that YouTUbe has gotten – such as Shelly Palmer’s article on Media 3.0.
The thing is — this new data is wrong.
- Jason