If you were thinking about embedding a few videos from YouTube on your site to generate some revenue be warned that your site may very well be pulled down by Google. Looks like the giant has been awakened and has immediately updated its Terms of Use. The update is specifically targeted at those who purposely embed videos to boost traffic and eventually generate revenue via ads. Does this include us bloggers who every now and then embed a video about services or simply to share? No, Google has relieved us of that as the point purpose is only to eliminate embedding by those who do so for commercial purposes:
We will enforce our Terms of Use against, say, a website that does nothing more than aggregate a bunch of embedded YouTube videos and intentionally tries to generate ad revenue from them.
Wow. That sucks.
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I have seen 100s of sites that rely on Youtube video to generate revenues. These sites include funny videos, children safe videos, scary videos etc. etc.. I don’t think youtube will loose half of it’s traffic.
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Jeet
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We’ll see. Note that their statement is pointed at “a website that does nothing more than”…which means that no value is added. I don’t believe it necessarily takes a lot to add value. It can be commentary, it might even be organizing by topic or niche. But what it can’t be is just stealing and posting videos. This should be the operating philosophy of all who care about using the web to its best advantage anyway. Google is certainly capable of being capricious in the application of its policies (as I saw when a friend was smacked down last week), but I’ve also seen that they tend to be more moderate when one actually does something for a reason and can convey that reason. They are trying to solve problems with a few rules, which are, of necessity, blunt instruments.
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I think it’s more like a warning too with actions that will take place now and then. The idea is definitely to moderate the excessive embeds on the concerned sites. Let’s see
Regards,
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