So as you probably know, Viacom is trying to sue Google for $1 billion over YouTube and its all quite sad and funny at the same time as what is $1 billion to a company who spent nearly double as much on the acquisition of the video sharing website, no to mention the capex and opex. Google paid out over $5.2 billion to AdSense publishers last year, keeping a tidy sum for themselves and obviously they’re going to make sure YouTube pays out a few billion to YouTube partners at some point in the near future too – but a lot of interesting details are emerging from all the newly released court records with some potentially severe implications for regular YouTubers. The new disclosures are part of a court-ordered data dump after both Viacom and YouTube asked the judge for summary judgment in its favor.
The lawsuit is really heating up now with Viacom posting its Motion here, Google with its brief in defence of YouTube here and the copyright law blogs are just loving it, here is one good read. Remember, Viacom tried to buy YouTube a good few times and weren’t one bit pleased when Google beat them to it, so at the outset this was just them acting frantically and it seems they still haven’t got it together. Even the producers of The Daily Show acknowledged the effect of YouTube on their ratings and though I don’t have anything to link to right now, I’m sure you remember those John Stewart and Steven Colbert clips in /videos which used to get millions of views. Its doubtful that even if Viacom did win that their execs would invest that money in their video platform and repair the “damage” or whatever it was they’re suing for, but let’s not digress.
So first off, we learn that YouTube founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim only got 334 and 301 and 66 million US dollars respectively from the sale of the site to Google, in stock. I say “only” because the deal was 1.65 billion, so it seems the founders only got half? Well, Sequoia Capital got 516 million as they had invested 9m in YouTube so its only fair, right? That leaves us with 433m unaccounted for, so I imagine was paid out in cash and/or to other stakeholders. Who knows, I don’t really care at this point, but I was quite surprised to learn of Sequoia’s massive profits from the sale.
What really struck me was the amount of user accounts YouTube claims it has banned as part of its efforts to curb copyright infringing uploads. Its quite shocking actually. Page 34 of Google’s brief linked to above reads…
YouTube has terminated more than 400,000 user accounts based at least in part on copyright strikes.
What? I already knew that the number of banned YouTubers was big and getting bigger, I’ve even had a good few of my own accounts suspended and keep on bumping into more, but 400k is really quite shocking because there are plenty of untold stories behind each ban. YouTube’s harsh penalty of banning a channels for just 3 infringing uploads, with the warnings often coming all in at the same time has meant a lot of legitimately original content belonging to the channel owners has been lost too.
With Google signing on an increasing number of content partners, a good many of whom are getting a hang of the YouTube CMS for the purpose of blocking video and audio matches of their copyrighted content, there are going to be a good many more accounts being banned. 400k can quite easily become 4 million by the end of this lawsuit.
Google ought to realise though that banning channels really only serves to piss of a very loyal userbase. Since there is a system for tracking video and audio matches, there should be no need to bann user accounts ever, only infringing uploads.