The Next Web

Some media companies finally get it and profit from illegal YouTube movies

Written on August 18, 2008 – 12:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

“For the most part, people who are uploading videos are fans of our movies. They’re not trying to be evil pirates, and they’re not trying to get revenue from it.”

There you go! See? It isn’t that hard to say goodbye to that negative “the digital revolution is gonna kill us” attitude. The man who said the above words to The New York Times really gets it: Curt Marvis, the president of digital media at Lionsgate Entertainment. His company doesn’t remove illegal YouTube movies, but prefers to profit from it. YouTube offers them the possibility to profit from the advertisements on the video page and shows a little banner, saying Lionsgate Entertainment owns the movie.

Indirect profit

CBS, Universal Music, Electronic Arts and some other participating companies won’t make millions of dollars from this unconventional advertising program. Since the ads only appear on a fraction of all the YouTube videos and most of them hardly track a hundred views. But it’s not so much about direct profit here, but more about indirect profit.

With the media companies allowing mash-ups of content they own the copyright of, fan subcultures can flourish. Every YouTube user can create his own trailer of his favorite movie or give the storyline a twist. Some become real hits. So while the media companies are making a few pennies from the ads directly, they indirectly boost sales via web hypes.

Not everybody is convinced

Not all of world’s media giants are convinced by YouTube. Time Warner and Murdoch’s News Corporation are willing, since they acknowledge testing the new advertisement model, but still a bit afraid. Disney and NBC Universal prefer to see visitors of illegal movie pages automatically forward to their own videos.

But the worst and most old-fashioned of all is Viacom. They’re still busy lining up the 1 billion dollars copyright infringement case against YouTube. If the company wins, the billion dollars might compensate some of Viacom’s losses on sales. But what about the future? How will they boost sales in five years? They’d better start to get used to the new age and profit from it, just like some of their competitors do.

I hope you like that post!

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cbs, disney, electronic arts, lionsgate, nbc universal, news corporation, time warner, Viacom, youtube

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Comcast acquires Daily Candy for 125 million dollars

Written on August 6, 2008 – 11:28 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Women are beautiful. Street photographer Garry Winogrand stated this in 1975 and he’s absolutely right. Online marketeers also agree with him and they don’t leave any chance unused to make some money out of their online presence.

Ask Glam Media, the publishing company that focuses on women and recently acquired ad agencies in the UK and Germany. But the big women marketing-related news of today is the $125 million dollar acquisition of online women’s magazine Daily Candy by Comcast.

Daily Candy - formerly owned by Pilot Group Ventures - sends its subscribers a daily email with tips, news, and info about fashion, food, travel and other glossy magazine-like topics.

Comcast was battling with Viacom to acquire DailyCandy, which allegedly makes 25 million dollars a year. Comcast has beaten the other advertising giant with 5 million dollars. Women are beautiful, especially in the world of online publishing.

acquisition, Comcast, DailyCandy, Garry Winogrand, Glam Media, publishing, Viacom, women

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Hooray! Lawyers in YouTube lawsuit reach user privacy deal

Written on July 15, 2008 – 2:18 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor

Viacom, owner of media channels as MTV, accused Google to facilitate copyright infringement on Youtube. The lawsuit that followed summoned Google to comprehend and give user-data to Viacom, data included the user playlists, IP addresses and time-codes. That was two weeks ago, today we find that Viacom stepped down from their original demand.

Google will not be obligated to provide the user-data to Viacom. “We have reached agreement with Viacom and the class action group,” Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes said. Youtube will anonymize the data before it is published to Viacom, leaving out critical information such as usernames and IP addresses.

I am not in favor of copyright infringement, and I support the idea of a monetary stream back to the respective artist, but the original settlement was one step closer to Viacom suing everyone that watched the latest videoclip of Madonna on youtube, or worse, who has been Rickrolled for that matter! This settlement is a step in the right direction for privacy protection, congratulations.

google, piracy, Viacom, youtube

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