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YouTube
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Chad and Steve
What Viacom really wants to know about YouTube videos
What is Viacom really after in its $1 billion lawsuit against Google over YouTube? Despite a lengthy invite list, Viacom PR was only to drum up "a small press gathering" to listen to CEO Philippe Dauman at a screening for Tropic Thunder last night, according to Greg Sandoval's report on News.com. Dauman called YouTube a "rogue company" — and expressed disappointment that Google did nothing to rein it in. Viacom's now being painted as a rogue itself, seeking to violate YouTube users' privacy in requesting viewing logs from the site. More »
social news
Half of the 50 hottest girls on Digg are fake -- but the site works anyway
Conventional wisdom has it that males on the Internet gravitate toward pictures of pretty women like hungry honeybees to a sugary tulip, and click, click, click. It's why Tila Tequila has 3,345,634 MySpace friends and Tania Derveaux has 108,907 YouTube subscribers. It's why, on social news site Digg, so many spammers pretend to be attractive women — to attract votes for their stories from Digg users incapable of holding onto their mouse finger when faced with a picture of a pretty woman. But does this method work? We decided to find out. More »
6:00 PM on Mon Jul 21 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
127,227 views,
33 comments
online video
Has Avril Lavigne made $2 million from YouTube? Highly unlikely
The "Girlfriend" video from tweenybopper pop diva Avril Lavigne has taken the all-time views title away from Judson Laipply's Evolution of Dance, though it's still stuck in the second spot on YouTube's leaderboard. Besides being manually kept out of the top spot, what have all those views garnered the young guitarista? According to her label's CEO Terry McBride of Nettwerk Management, $2 million in revenue-sharing income from YouTube. But a longtime reader who's represented other popular YouTube partners with eight-figure view counts called shenanigans: More »
YouTube blowing away competition as distribution platform
TubeMogul, a startup which allows content creators to post video clips to multiple sites at once and track aggregate views for the clip across sites, did a survey of over 200,000 clips and how much traffic they garnered after 90 days. The results? The average clip got more views on YouTube in three months (3,092) than on the next eight video sites combined (2,092). [NewTeeVee]
copyfight
Mahalo Daily, the promotional show from manually manicured search-results provider Mahalo, is no longer available on YouTube. Not just a few clips have been taken down, but the whole account has been suspended. Why? A series of DMCA takedown notices from Google nemesis Viacom, naturally. I spoke to Mahalo Daily producer Tyler Crowley, who explained that he received a number of violation notices in quick succession, triggering YouTube's "three strikes, you're out" account suspension policy — even though Mahalo Daily is part of the YouTube partner program. What crime against intellectual property did Mahalo Daily commit?
More »
Mahalo Daily suspended from YouTube
Mahalo Daily, the promotional show from manually manicured search-results provider Mahalo, is no longer available on YouTube. Not just a few clips have been taken down, but the whole account has been suspended. Why? A series of DMCA takedown notices from Google nemesis Viacom, naturally. I spoke to Mahalo Daily producer Tyler Crowley, who explained that he received a number of violation notices in quick succession, triggering YouTube's "three strikes, you're out" account suspension policy — even though Mahalo Daily is part of the YouTube partner program. What crime against intellectual property did Mahalo Daily commit?
More »
The Googling
The best Google ad ever
Google has always been weak at marketing, hobbled by a cultishly engineering-centric culture that believes products should promote themselves. It worked for search, but little else. The official list of Google-branded Web services is dizzying in its me-too obscurity. Chipper house-ad videos posted on YouTube have done nothing to change this. Perhaps Google should hire The Vacationeers, makers of "The Googling"? More »
great moments in pr
5 questions Viacom doesn't want Valleywag to ask Philippe Dauman
Touchy Viacom flack Jeremy Zweig called Valleywag up to let us know personally that we'd been disinvited from next week's press-only screening of Tropic Thunder. Such a pity! Because we had a list of questions we were going to ask Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman: More »
double standards
How Google could humiliate Viacom in YouTube lawsuit
Worried that your obsessive kitten-video viewing records on YouTube would be exposed in Viacom's copyright lawsuit against YouTube? You can relax. Google and Viacom lawyers have reached an agreement to anonymize records of usernames and IP addresses in YouTube's video-viewing logs, which Viacom wants to examine to show patterns of willful copyright infringement on the site. The accounts of employees of both companies, however, aren't included in the deal. And that suggests a negotiating tactic for Google. More »
great moments in pr
Viacom unleashes PR thunder on San Francisco's press corps
Viacom's legal spat with Google has the media conglomerate cast in copyright-hating, freedom-to-upload-videos-loving Silicon Valley as a mustachio-twirling villain, out to expose YouTube viewers' usernames and IP addresses. Bwahahaha! Benighted flack Jeremy Zweig has been reduced to leaving comments on blogs in response. At last, he's getting some corporate firepower: Zweig and Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman Sr. are inviting a bunch of tech journalists a screening next Monday of Tropic Thunder, the Ben Stiller action-movie parody coming to theaters next month, and YouTube probably sooner than that. We've seen the invite list, and it left us scratching our heads. More »
copyfight
Viacom wants to know viewing habits of YouTube employees
As a part of its copyright-infringement lawsuit against Google and YouTube, Viacom lawyers have asked for data that will detail which videos YouTube employees have watched and uploaded. Google has so far refused to provide the information, delaying an already agreed-upon transfer of some 12 terabytes of data detailing what types of videos are most often viewed on the site. Here's why Viacom wants the employee information: More »
online video
Throwing good money after bad: $6 billion in VC for video sites
$6 billion has been invested by venture capital firms into American online video sites since 2005. And that's against only one real payday, Google's $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube, which has only garnered revenue in the low eight figures. True, advertisers spent $17 billion at the television upfronts, as Silicon Alley Insider's Michael Leamonth points out, giving an idea of the potential market that's being chased. More »
great moments in pr
Viacom says it never wanted to know all the videos you watched (but it did)
Despite reports to the contrary, Viacom did not, as a part of its copyright suit against Google and YouTube, ask for "any personally identifiable information of any YouTube user" the company now wants us all to believe. It will get data from YouTube, but anything personally identifiying will be "stripped from the data." It's nice bit of PR revisionism. According to court documents, Viacom did "seek all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed." Only after the court sided with Viacom, but public opinion did not, did Viacom agree to accept scrubbed data. (Photo by AP)
google
Why YouTube can't make money -- the 100-word version
Tim Armstrong, Google's head of North American advertising and commerce, is tasked with turning Google's $1.65 billion money pit cum legal headache, YouTube, into a profitable enterprise. Since the departure of the online video-sharing site's former moneyman, Shashi Seth, ideas ranging from affiliate links to iTunes to sharing revenue with third-party sites that embed the limited stock of professional videos, have been floated. But the real problem seems to be an amazing number of bottlenecks any deal has to go through, the Wall Street Journal reports: More »
online video
What keeps porn off of YouTube? People
What keeps YouTube free from hardcore porn? Sadly, not a "Galaga-like spaceship that shoots down constellations of flesh-colored pixels" holding YouTube steady from an onslaught of naked ladies and sex scenes. That's the cutesiest explanation fit to print for how the Web's most prolific publisher of webcam bum-shaking videos prevents porn from "dirtying up" the screen. But really, it's a bunch of human beings — YouTube's only around-the-clock support team, or so we hear — who are responsible for deleting explicit or erotic uploads. More »
google
Google's antitrust defense -- the 100-word version
Google has come under increasing fire for a lack of transparency in how it does everything — from keeping porn off YouTube to calculating advertising rates to determining which search results go where. I may personally distrust the wise benevolence of markets, but information asymmetry is a time-tested business tactic. In an article comparing the applied economics of Microsoft in the PC era and Google in the Internet era, the New York Times gets more of the same blather from the Googleplex regarding the enigma wrapped inside a puzzle wrapped inside the algorithm from Hal Varian, Google's in-house rent-a-quote economics guru: More »
clips
The Web's 10 best fireworks displays
A full half of our usual readership came to Valleywag on Christmas day last year. Even more showed up on New Year's Eve. We figure a good percentage of you will be stuck at the office today, too. So if you can't come out to see the Fourth of July fireworks tonight, we'll bring them to you, with the Web's 10 best fireworks videos. A surprising six come from IAC's Vimeo, proving that hosting expensive high-definition content is totally worth it at least once a year. All of them are guaranteed not to maim small children or start wildfires. More »
your privacy is an illusion
