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Vidmeter, a video tracking site has released some interesting statistics, which shows that the famous videos like the little guy, and the lonely girl that were removed from Youtube on the request of copyright owners just accounted for 5.93% of the sites most popular videos. Keep in mind that since its not possible to crawl and get statistics of the entire Youtube repository Vidmeter crawled a sample of 6,725 of Youtube`s most popular videos over the last three months for the purpose of this report.
Vidmeter checks Youtube four times a day for the 100 most popular videos of all time, the current month, the week and the day. The service gathered a list of videos which have been replaced with a takedown notice alert. The videos that were took down accounted for 9.23% of top videos and 5.93% of views, that is not even a half half proposition. The study clearly proves that the popularity of Youtube is not based on copyrighted content, another study showed that the Youtube traffic actually increased after the takedown of 100,000 videos on the cease and desist notice of Viacom.
Another interesting take on this is that of Techcrunch, they feel that “the limits on video lenght, DMCA takedown notices and billion dollar law suits have seriously damaged Youtube´s ability to facilitate serious law suit infringments” and hence have suggest a couple of sites that are coming up to fill in this void.
Read: Mashable, Newteevee and Internet Outsider.
This data does not “clearly prove” anything — except that the internet is the perfect place to spread misinterpreted data. Vidmeter claims that the removed clips only account for (about) 6 percent of the clips. Well, look at YouTube right now, and it is still full of illegal clips. If 6 percent of the whole site was moved, and that wasn’t even a small fraction of the offending clips, then this data shows that YouTube WAS (and IS) primarily stolen material.
It also means the nay-sayers are correct. As Shelly Palmer has written, on media 3.0 — YouTube has not business without the pirated clips.
And I can’t imagine that business model is worth $1.6 Billion.
Jason
Thanks for your article, Now there is more reason to comment than ever before! This is a great fir for our project!