18 Comments Add your own

• 1. tdc  |  September 20th, 2007 at 11:35 am

  you wonder why belo and other station groups (not to mention third party providers) haven’t done a catch-all site using their properties like this.

  take it one step further and ask why a local station doesn’t launch a citizenrain.tv-type thing in their own city before someone else do.

• 2. Anonymous  |  September 20th, 2007 at 11:38 am

  It’s not just that Drudge links to him, Breitbart is his former long-term partner (at The Drudge Report). Drudge himself hotlinks news photos (practically all his photos are hotlinked) without any links or crediting of the source

• 3. baker  |  September 20th, 2007 at 11:47 am

  if the material is copyrighted and posted on YouTube, LiveLeak, DailyMotion and other video sites by the copyright holder, then tough beans, i say. YouTuber beware!

  kinda screws up the “YouTube” as a great promotional tool defense, eh? copyright holders are responsible for creating revenue opportunities when their video leaves their site. if this is a matter of my video getting 100K plays via Breightbart and my bumpers or overlay or pre-roll go along with the player, then good for me and good for Breitbart. if i put all my eggs in the YouTube basket or via share sites that don’t offer me any way to control ad opps within the player area, bummer for me. however, if i’m using brightcove (for example) and have full player and ad control, i’d submit every feed i had to Breitbart for inclusion.

  p.s. of course, if Breitbart is posting copyrighted material posted to these sites from anyone other than the content creator, that’s BS, of course, and Breitbart should be held accountable. at the very least, i bet a takedown notice might actually get a response within 2 weeks, or ever, YOUTUBE!

• 4. Jeremiah  |  September 20th, 2007 at 1:38 pm

  ^^^ What baker said.

  Locally, KCRA puts a selection of their news stories on DaTube. I don’t think they care if someone embeds the video - or even makes a few AdSense bucks on it - KCRA’s logo featured prominently, and the embedded video is usually only 2-3 clicks from KCRA’s site.

  They should be thankful that an aggregator like Breitbart is using their material.

• 5. Cory  |  September 20th, 2007 at 3:34 pm

  Sure, that may work for the stations that post their video to YouTube willingly, which right now is just the Hearst stations, like KCRA. But the rest of us are not.

• 6. tdc  |  September 20th, 2007 at 4:40 pm

  psst.

  it’s just breitbart.tv

• 7. Brink  |  September 21st, 2007 at 6:00 am

  I say, sue ‘em.

  The days of the wild west internet, where anything goes, are long past. If you don’t protect your copyright, others make money from your content.

• 8. Rob  |  September 21st, 2007 at 8:54 am

  I was thinking about this last night Cory … you and I both aggregate news content from other news organizations and surround that content with our advertising right?

  So what’s different here with Breitbart pulling copyrighted video from public domain websites where the intent was to publish the content so it could be aggregated?

  Personally I don’t see a difference. The second you slap Breitbart’s hand we have to take a hard look at what we’re doing ourselves.

• 9. Rob  |  September 21st, 2007 at 9:22 am

  On a side note … we’ve had a YouTube channel since late Spring and I have no problem with Breitbart if they started swiping our videos. YouTube is a content sharing platform but it’s also a promotional platform. People will see our content and the trend we’ve seen is that some of them come to our website for more.

  To me it doesn’t matter from a promotional perspective if they see our content on YouTube, embedded in a blog or on Breitbart. To me it matters that wherever they are seeing our content they are still seeing our content.

  One concession I’ll give is that KING doesn’t appear to a YT channel yet there are people out there posting your content (especially news bloopers). In that case, if that were happening to me yeah I’d get ticked off if someone was aggregating my content without my consent.

• 10. !  |  September 21st, 2007 at 9:43 am

  rob, congrats (belatedly albeit) on the yt channel. (remember when having one of those was nearly unheard of by tv stations?)

  if memory serves you were the one who kept mentioning how the idea was s-l-o-w-l-y being considered (and rejected)… and how the mentions here of its value were pushing you to make the case.

  course, if that was someone else, i apologize.

• 11. Cory  |  September 21st, 2007 at 10:10 am

  Rob, there’s a difference between LINKING other people’s content and surrounding those links and short summaries with your ads… and completely EMBEDDING other people’s content from start to finish.

• 12. Brink  |  September 21st, 2007 at 11:22 am

  “To me it matters that wherever they are seeing our content they are still seeing our content.”

  To our advertisers, it matters if they’re seeing OUR advertisements. They couldn’t care less if 250,000 people watch our video on YOUR site with YOUR ads.

• 13. Rob  |  September 21st, 2007 at 1:30 pm

  ! - Thanks man. Yeah I remember when having a YT page was unheard of, but management here sees it as a really powerful tool to promote our content and share it with the community in the hopes they’ll watch our newscasts and visit our website.

  Cory - Whether its a headline, a lead paragraph or an entire video clip it’s still profiting in a fashion from someone else’s content. The amount of content is irrelevant as long as you are profiting from someone else’s work.

  Brink - The point I was trying to make is that posting content to YouTube gets people exposed to our content in the hopes that they do one of two things. One, they come to our website for more content - we don’t post everything on YouTube - where they see more of our content with our pre-rolls and our advertisements. Two, they see our content on YouTube and maybe they tune in to our TV newscasts to see more.

  Either way, the potential migration of community members from YouTube to our website or our newscasts means increasing traffic on our branded products and either way our advertisers win.

• 14. Jason  |  September 21st, 2007 at 3:53 pm

  I suppose I’d like to see some evidence that the people who are watching on YouTube (or breitBart) are coming to your website. I find that somewhat hard to believe, but I’m happy to be proved wrong.

• 15. Rob  |  September 21st, 2007 at 4:40 pm

  Jason, our traffic reporting system - Google Analytics - is showing we’re getting some traffic from YT to our website.

  Not to blow sunshine here, but I can’t be completely forthright with tangible numbers (I work for a TV station in competition with the local Belo affiliate). But we are seeing a small amount of traffic from the one site to the other.

• 16. Jason  |  September 21st, 2007 at 8:30 pm

  I suppose any extra traffic is good traffic… but I think the key for local TV stations is to win locally. As a local blogger and reporter, I want the biggest audience possible. So I’m all for getting out-of-market people to see my stuff.

  But if I were selling ads, I’d want to win locally, and get local people to our site. I wouldn’t really care about the Fark or the BreitBart or the YouTube traffic. I want people who are going to come and visit my client’s furniture store.

• 17. tdc  |  September 21st, 2007 at 9:00 pm

  this is where all your prior years in the business work against you. why can’t you sell those ads for your “client’s furniture store” and have a partnership with others so when your local audience travels the world online they get served your ads just like they do when they visit your ‘local’ site? this would work with all the incoming fark, yt and now breitbart users in reverse.

  you win because you sell the ad. your client wins because he/she gets the message to a viable target and the internet user wins because they get a message they can use. and it’s all local.

• 18. Jason  |  September 22nd, 2007 at 12:32 pm

  I agree, tdc, but this is not happening right now. So I’m proposing maximizing the opportunities within the current reality.

  There’s lots of news sites on the web, lots of video sites, many are far superior than any local television station’s site. What can our site do better? LOCAL. Maximize that, and you really win.

  (example: Cory’s Citizen Rain effort in Seattle.)

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