UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

YouTube’s popularity is continuing to grow.  Searches on YouTube now account for over 25% of all searches done on Google.  That means that if YouTube searches were counted separately from Google, YouTube would be the second most popular search engine on the internet ahead of both Yahoo and Microsoft.

Despite the popularity of YouTube, media companies continually send take-down requests to get their videos removed from YouTube.  Most famously, Viacom sued YouTube for $1 Billion for making Viacom media available on YouTube.

When the Viacom-produced movie Tropic Thunder was released, the stars of the movie produced a mock viral video and posted it to YouTube in order to generate publicity for the movie:

The stars in the video state that they are producing the video to post on the internet for publicity, which generated positive buzz in advertising circles for its originality.  Despite this, Viacom sent a take-down request to YouTube, claiming that they were illegally using Viacom property and forced them to remove the video from the site.

Despite popular belief, it it is not the case that media companies not being paid for their content.  Today, Warner Music Group announced that it was pulling all of it’s music videos off of YouTube despite a previous deal that paid them whenever their music videos were watched.  It is even speculated that Google was losing money on the deal while Warner was being paid millions.

While YouTube search is more popular than Yahoo search and a potentially lucrative profit stream, content providers are still removing their material from YouTube.  No company would request to be removed from search engines like Yahoo since it is so vital to their online presence.  In fact, the opposite is true.  An entire new industry of search engine expertise has developed to help these companies rank higher in searches.  Yet when even better opportunities for free publicity exist, they let their fear of industry change take precedence over making money.