Cuban: YouTube is commercials and fake porn

If it’s not blatantly obvious already, Mark Cuban is not a YouTube fan. But in this case, I think he has a point. Cuban breaks down the list of the top 20 videos in December and discovers that most clips are commercials and fake porn. What’s fake porn, you ask? It’s a headline and thumbnail that promises nude video of, say, Britney Spears but turns out to be a cat with the message, “Excuse me, WTF R U doin?” Between the commercials (which he defines broadly, like clips from SNL and Letterman) and the fake porn, Cuban found just 3 user-generated clips out of the top 20. “Could it be that Gootube will fade?” he asks. Unlikely, but he raises some interesting questions. If YouTube begins to delete the fake porn, are they going astray of Safe Harbor laws? What really qualifies as a video view if people are bailing out of a clip a second after it plays? Will fake porn discourage major content providers from partnering with YouTube? All worthy questions, although I’ll remind folks that the vast majority of YouTube’s traffic is not from the few “most popular” hits but the long tail of video that people are uploading and sharing with their friends. Plus, the home page is still hand-selected and largely user-created. Cuban adds in comments below, in part: “What I tried to do is look at it from a business perspective. YouTube can’t subsidize bandwidth forever. If it’s merely a hosting service for the LongTail, then they are going to have a huge bandwidth bill. How are they going to pay for it?”