SEO Blog

Search Engine Watch editor Elisabeth Osmeloski received a call this morning from Viacom, the parent company of MTV Networks, with a breaking news story.

Earlier today, MTVNetworks instructed Google and YouTube to remove “unauthorized” content from their systems. According to MTVNetworks, that unauthorized contentis made up of over 100,000 clips accouting for about 1.2billion video streams.

Metamend CEO Todd Hooge sent a copy of the article over. We had been talking about the addition of video advertising to YouTube video streams at a meeting last week. Here is a bit of my reply to his email this morning.
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My first reaction is: This is not going to end well for professional content creators, at least not in the short-term. Free entertainment content is too readily available, as witnessed by the faked Bridezilla video from last week. (warning - strong language) That video, which was entirely scripted and staged, has seen over 2.5 million downloads in a week. While the SuperBowl will top that in viewers, 2.5million is in the ballpark of average viewership of a successful sitcom.