Cuban: Just overwhelm YouTube
Cory Bergman March 1st, 2007
Mark Cuban thinks the Academy shouldn’t have issued a cease-and-desist order to YouTube to pull down clips of the Oscars, but not for the reason you might think. After all, Cuban doesn’t believe media companies should allow YouTube to “become the de facto manager” of their brands by aggregating eyeballs around their content. But he has a unique solution for the Academy: get a bunch of interns and edit 10-second clips of the Oscars that end with a graphic that plugs Oscar.com for full video. Then upload them, en masse, to YouTube. “I wouldn’t post this video one time,” Cuban writes. “I would post this video 100 times. And I would do the same thing for EVERY moment and segment in the Oscars. The reality is that YouTube viewers will grow tired of scanning through every video and just click over to Oscars.com.” He’s probably right, but of course, this would be all-out war with YouTube. And perhaps frustration isn’t the best way to motivate users to visit your site, but does it matter if they weren’t going to visit your site in the first place?
Adds Echy in comments: “If as you say the viewer wasn’t going to visit the site of the content owner then it’s okay to let YouTube keep the content for free? You’re out of your mind. Don’t get me wrong. I could care less about the Oscars, YouTube and most of the video available on the internet. But this idea that letting someone else display content that belongs to someone else is wrong. It won’t generate more viewers for the content provider (read paid ad views) because the viewer never has to visit the content generators site. They just keep going back to YouTube.”
Adds Safran: “In this model, how many people do you suppose would watch the clip, get fooled and then think, ‘Hey, good for them! I’m gonna go to Oscars.com now.’ Alienating and tricking your biggest fans is a lousy way to drum up traffic.”
7 Comments Add your own
1. Echy | March 1st, 2007 at 5:34 am
If as you say the viewer wasn’t going to visit the site of the content owner then it’s okay to let YouTube keep the content for free? You’re out of your mind. Don’t get me wrong. I could care less about the Oscars, YouTube and most of the video available on the internet. But this idea that letting someone else display content that belongs to someone else is wrong. It won’t generate more viewers for the content provider (read paid ad views) because the viewer never has to visit the content generators site. They just keep going back to YouTube.
2. Steve Safran | March 1st, 2007 at 6:26 am
While I continue to believe Cuban\’s on the wrong side of the YouTube argument, I\’ll give him points for creativity. Still, it\’s a case of old media trying to protect its old model. Cuban\’s idea isn\’t entirely original - record companies did something similar in the waning days of Napster by uploading clips purporting to be songs by certain artists that were actually 10 second loops of that song.
Mark: In this model, how many people do you suppose would watch the clip, get fooled and then think \”Hey, good for them! I\’m gonna go to Oscars.com now.\” Alienating and tricking your biggest fans is a lousy way to drum up traffic.
3. thedetroitchannel | March 1st, 2007 at 6:33 am
youtube’s response?
a clip of bush saying “bring it on”
4. Hussman | March 1st, 2007 at 7:34 am
I’m surprised people still watch the Oscars to be honest.
5. discreet_chaos | March 1st, 2007 at 10:35 am
If you want Oscar coverage, you should go to oscar-dot, ET-dot-yahoo, CNN or the LA paper; Why would you go to one of the dozens of amateur video sites?
I know - I need a recipe for chowder; I think I’ll skip the recipe database on marthastewart and go to the Chicago Tribune, instead. I bet they’ve done at least one feature on chowder in the past ten years and hey, a periodical website is a periodical website - right?
6. zvi | March 1st, 2007 at 10:57 am
Cuban’s solution only works if the Oscar.com website has clips of the ceremony itself. I went to the Oscars.com website looking for the Dreamgirls medley. No dice, so I went to Youtube.
Why didn’t I watch it on tv? Well, there was another tv show I wanted to watch more, so I watched three hours of Oscar and one hour of other program, and it was too much work for too little reward to tape the amount of Oscar I didn’t watch live.
7. Bryan Murley | March 3rd, 2007 at 10:39 am
ZVI has it right. The oscars.com web site has no clips at all. If the academy did something innovative with its web site, that would be one thing. As it is, Cuban’s “solution” sounds childish and would likely do more harm than good for the stodgy old folks in Hollywood. I liked him more when he was focused on the Mavericks.
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