* * * * *
                                        
                                  Freebooting
                                        
> Facebook says it’s now streaming more video than YouTube. To be able to
> make that claim, all they had to do was cheat, lie, and steal.
> 
> I’m a professional YouTube creator. Some people think that this is some
> kind of joke but I have 30 employees. All of them work in the online video
> industry, about half of them work directly on producing videos for our
> educational YouTube channels. We’re a small, profitable business.
> 
> Facebook is an interesting, emerging platform for us. Reaching an audience
> is valuable, even if there’s no way to turn that value into money. So I’m
> excited about the potential future of Facebook as a video platform.
> 
> But there are a few things that make me wary, not of their ability to grow
> my business, but of whether they give a shit about creators, which is
> actually pretty important to me. Let’s go through them one by one.
> 
> …
> 
> According to a recent report [1] from Ogilvy and Tubular Labs, of the 1000
> most popular Facebook videos of Q1 2015, 725 were stolen re-uploads. Just
> these 725 “freebooted [2]” videos were responsible for around 17 BILLION
> views last quarter. This is not insignificant, it’s the vast majority of
> Facebook’s high volume traffic. And no wonder, when embedding a YouTube
> video on your company’s Facebook page is a sure way to see it die a sudden
> death, we shouldn’t be surprised when they rip it off YouTube and upload it
> natively. Facebook’s algorithms encourage this theft.
> 
> What is Facebook doing about it?
> 
> They’ll take the video down a couple days after you let them know. Y’know,
> once it’s received 99.9% of the views it will ever receive.
> 
> Creators have been yelling (apparently into a void) about this for over a
> year now.
> 

Via Jason Kottke [3], “Theft, Lies, and Facebook Video — Medium [4]”

Now, it's not as if Facebook [5] is downloading videos from YouTube [6] and
placing the videos on their site, it's users of Facebook that are doing the
downloading and uploading to gain attention [7] , and it's Facebook that is
profiting from it by selling advertising around the uploaded video. And as
Kurzgesagt [8] and Destin Sandlin [9] have mentioned, they put a lot of work
into the videos and have partnered with YouTube for a share of the
advertising, something Facebook isn't doing.

What I suspect is going to happen only after enough content producers
threaten legal action is Facebook will have to set aside a portion of their
revenue for content creators and when the original creator of the video makes
a claim, get paid that portion of the revenue. Then it won't matter
necessarily where the video is shown, just that it is shown and the creator
gets a cut of the advertising revenue.

Kind of how YouTube now works.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/socialogilvy/the-rise-of-multiplatform-
[2] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/freebooting
[3] http://kottke.org/15/11/how-
[4] https://medium.com/@hankgreen/theft-lies-and-facebook-
[5] https://www.facebook.com/
[6] https://www.youtube.com/
[7] https://www.google.com/search?q=buying+and+selling+likes
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q
[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

.