Portland Social Media

So Your Clips Are on YouTube

For hobbyists and entrepreneurs, getting your videos on YouTube is a great way to build an audience, connect with a community and a way to build your brand. But, large content owning companies see things differently, and they aren’t happy.

On Tuesday of this week, those behind the Oscars, the Academy, contacted YouTube and demanded they take down videos uploaded by YouTube’s users of selected scenes from Oscar night. I haven’t watched any of the clips but Jason Chervokas blogging at the Social Media Club blog says the Will Farrell and Jack Black musical had been viewed over 250,000 times; it was very funny. YouTube complied on Wednesday and all the clips have now been removed.

What is at issue here is copyright, the web site Oscars.com and the Academy’s insistence that everyone must view Oscar-related clips on their web site (distribution). The Academy’s demand caught the attention of much-paid-attention-to Maverick’s owner and blogger Mark Cuban, who suggested the Academy should have just created a short preview of the full sketch and then transition to an advertisement encouraging people to go to Oscars.com to watch the current video and to view exclusives or behind-the-scenes videos.

This isn’t a bad idea, you might as well communicate on the massive network YouTube has and it won’t cost you anything; YouTube handles all the maintenance and staffing costs for hosting your video. In addition, somewhere in the Academy’s messaging on YouTube there could have been an encouragement for others to email the YouTube links to friends, post it in their blogs, etc.

I’m on the Oscars.com site right now and I can’t find the Will Farrell video anywhere - all they link to are Thank You Cam videos (boring), Press Room videos (what?), Road to the Oscars video, Ellen’s Video Diary and Behind the Scenes videos, and there is no way to embed these videos in your blog. Talk about bringing back the 90’s philosophy of “capturing eyeballs”.

So if you, as a professional or as an agent of a company, find yourself looking in horror as your commercials, produced videos, or short clips of your films flood onto YouTube, take some time to think about how you can engage the audience of people eagerly watching those videos. You never know, instead of scathing blog posts condemning an Oscars-like move, bloggers and the news might commend you for “getting it”, and you might make more money from your brand…there we go, now I got your attention!