Business Week has this concise piece on YouTube and the narrow straits it walks in finding a viable business model. The issue, of course, is how to monetize YouTube with ad revenues (which would undoubtedly be gargantuan) without running deep into serious copyright infringement liabilities.
Although lawyers agree that YouTube should be protected by copyright law as long as it responds to content owners’ requests to take down their works, it entered uncharted territory when it recently began adding ads next to search results. The law prohibits a site from benefiting financially from infringement, but the company argues that it’s protected since it doesn’t sell ads against individual videos. Still, the courts haven’t set clear boundaries. “There has to be some way to make money with advertising that doesn’t deprive you of the safe harbor. But where that line is, no one really knows,” says Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The piece lays out an astonishing statistic: YouTube accounts for 60% of all online video viewing. Meanwhile, according to this Guardian Unlimited article, which cites Alexa statistics, YouTube has now surpassed MySpace in traffic. YouTube has a 3.9% share of global internet visits a day compared with 3.35% for MySpace.
Cynthia Brumfield at 11:13 AM|Comments(0)
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