Honeymoon’s Over

  YouTube is slowly beginning to lose its luster.  And if they don’t act now, the video-sharing site’s future may be at stake.  On Monday, Comedy Central’s parent company, Viacom, ordered that all Comedy Central content be pulled from the site.  Users attempting to view clips of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report and South Park were met with a simple message: “This video has been removed due to terms of use violations.” 

  Comedy Central’s content on YouTube has, since the site’s inception just over a year ago, been one of its largest draws, and its removal may set a new trend among the owners of copyrighted content posted by the site’s millions of users.  In the beginning, most companies saw YouTube as a helpful tool, a vehicle for free promotion.  “Getting it off the Internet is no different than getting it off TV,” Jon Stewart recently told an interviewer.  But when the site was recently sold to Google for $1.65 billion, I suspect that the suits at Viacom began to realize that someone was getting very, very rich off of their product.

  It all boils down to two factors: site traffic and advertising revenue.  No, scratch that.  It all boils down to one factor: Money.  YouTube users, according to the terms of use, are not allowed to post copyrighted video on the site, but with 20 million unique visitors per month and 65,000 videos being uploaded daily, it is impossible to police.  When copyright holders ask YouTube to remove the copyrighted material, YouTube must then contact the user who posted it and have the videos removed. 

  While, to the average YouTuber, it may seem like Viacom is raining on the parade, they are actually just trying to protect their product.  And, I suspect, the plug-pulling won’t stop with Comedy Central content.  The media giant also owns MTV, MTV2, BET, VH1, CMT, Nickelodeon, Spike TV, Paramount Pictures, Showtime and the Sundance Channel, to name a few. 

  With YouTube’s future at stake, and all eyes watching, this would be a good time for the bigwigs at Google/YouTube and Viacom to call a meeting to hammer out an agreement to share advertising revenue.  YouTube already has similar deals in place with most of the major music companies, including Universal Music Group, and several of the U.S. television networks, including NBC and CBS.

  There are two ways this can be done.  The first would allow users to post Viacom-owned content without restrictions, YouTube to continue to sell advertising on the site, and then break Viacom off a small percentage of the ad revenue.  The other way would be a trade agreement, allowing Viacom to advertise its new ventures on YouTube.  (For example, banners reading “Don’t miss ‘The Real World: Guantanamo,’ this Thursday at 10!”)  Either would be mutually beneficial for both companies.

  If nothing is done to settle this little dispute, however, it may very well mark the beginning of a slippery slope toward YouTube’s demise, and Google’s $1.65 billion dollar albatross.

-From Pulse
   November 2, 2006