If you're talking about someone stealing content, and contravening your copyright/CC licence, that's one thing.
But if you're just talking about someone like YouTube making $x billion from paid advertising on content made by users who don't get a fair share of that, obviously there's little change from the old media model, with a small number of big distribution channels sharing millions of viewers. Isn't that the American way, and won't it always been the same in everything - farming/supermarkets - manufacturing/retail - production/ distribution? Efficiencies of scale in massive national or international businesses with massive expenditure and massive earnings, while local Mom & Pop businesses struggle to survive unless they get a lucky break with a product that's picked up by the big boys (and then go bust when the big boys drop them)? The situation will always favour larger corporations who can establish and build much larger supply, infrastructure & advertising relationships, but then they spend a great deal more money and effort on those things too. YouTube handles all the costs and logistics of UI design, infrastructure, hosting, bandwidth, promotion, media buying, tech support - they're providing a platform that attracts users, and they're looking for people who want to publish content for free for them to make money from. Admittedly, unlike their predecessors, the big web channels don't pay producers anything. But the big new payoff is that it's not against their ToS to use YouTube to advertise your own channel for free. This is the big opportunity, surely. You can tap into their huge audience base and funnel some of them off to your own channel where you handle all the costs and logistics of design, infrastructure, hosting, promotion, media buying, tech support. So instead of donating all your content to them to make money from, you can craft 'advertisement' content that's specifically designed to lure some of YouTube's vast audience to yourchannel.com. In both old and new models, whoever is spending all the money and effort bringing in the actual $$ will keep most of those $$. If YouTube's doing that work and spending that money, they get to keep the profits - if you're prepared to do that work and spend that money (having stolen some of their audience) you get to keep the profits. Until now, independent producers have had to do deals with the channels or distribution companies signing all rights away in deals that left the channel/distribution co making far more than the producers. There was no alternative - no way for indie producers to set up their own distribution and advertising deals. Even FilmFour, which produced Slumdog Millionaire, the winner of Best Picture this year, is struggling to survive. Slumdog has made 10-20 times its budget of $15m, but apparently only a tiny proportion of that will make it back to FilmFour. Plus ça change... Rupert http://twittervlog.tv On 27-Mar-09, at 12:45 PM, Jay dedman wrote: > You answered your own question. If you need this hosting site more > than they need you, then they win. What site are you talking about? > > > . > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
