News: Shortly after Viacom sued YouTube, I questioned in this post whether Viacom’s factual allegations in its complaint were way overblown, specifically those contending that YouTube’s business model is built on a “massive” amount of infringing files. Based on my own daily review of YouTube videos, that seemed untrue. Most of the files on YouTube appear to me to be user-created content or home videos. Viacom complained about 130,000 files — that number would comprise less than an even a small fraction of one percent of the several billion files on YouTube. And most of the most popular videos on YouTube are user-generated content.
This week, Vidmeter.com, an online site that tracks video sharing online, has issued a report substantiating some of my points and the relatively modest role that infringing files play on YouTube. From a 3-month study of the most-watched videos on YouTube (6,725 videos that were collectively viewed over 1 billion times), Vidmeter concludes: “In summary, we found that of the 6,725 most popular videos on YouTube, only 621 had been removed due to copyright requests. Views to the removed videos made up less than 6% of all recorded YouTube views.”
Specifically, Viacom’s removed files constituted only 2.37% of all views on YouTube during that time period.
April 7, 2007 at 5:10 am |
Actually the study is a plus for Viacom.
If copyrighted content only comprises less than 6% of all views YouTube should not have a problem removing them. It does not affect their total views too much and the number of videos shouldn’t be that large in comparision to the total on the site either.
April 8, 2007 at 8:27 pm |
I invite you to send the following message to Viacom press@viacom.com and to convince friends to do the same:
http://www.toniyoo.com/viacom.html