A new study from online video tracker Vidmeter.com produced some interesting results in light of recent broohahas over copyrighted network videos and YouTube. It turns out that less than one in ten videos were uploaded without permission of the copyright holders, and that material accounted for only about six percent of YouTube’s overall viewership. Clearly a blast to their megamoney lawsuit, Viacom is already calling the study’s methodology flawed. The findings do gibe with conventional wisdom and anecdotal observations that YouTube’s strength and popularity lie in the long tail business model and user-focused strategy to provide a simple service for posting, sharing and syndicated user generated video content. If true, it also may have scarier implications for big media’s role in the space where an engaged community of content contributors may find their products have diminishing attractiveness. YouTube may not be a sea of piracy at all, but an ocean of empowerment.
Adds Cory in comments: “YouTube is popular because of its technology, not copyrighted content. It makes it easy and free for anyone to host, share and embed players with their own video. There are millions of people out their with video cameras, but they don’t know how to convert their video to Flash, host their video on a streaming server, build a Flash player, etc. YouTube takes care of all of this with a couple clicks. Brilliant…”
Adds GB: “Cory, the report doesn’t prove that YouTube isn’t popular because of copyrighted content. It proves that YouTube isn’t popular because of unauthorized copyrighted content that has been found and removed by the copyright owner. I question why Vidmeter only counted videos removed due to copyright violations as being unauthorized. Wouldn’t it have been a lot more meaningful to look at those 6,725 and judge whether they were user-generated vs. copyrighted content (authorized or unauthorized)? That would prove how much YouTube relies on copyrighted content…”
