YouTube and Facebook Video Causing Issues for Content Owners

The monetization of eyeballs can cause plenty of problems when it comes to video content.

YouTube itself suffers from this as copyrighted content is often times reposted with optimized titles for search, raking in tons of dollars for videos that garner millions of views. Search for any famous song, movie clip and more, you’ll see dozens of results for each, often times with only one being the original owner.

Piracy makes these people millions of dollars re-purposing content and monetizing with ads.

But things are only set to get more complicated, as Facebook has quickly become a video powerhouse in the past few years. The service, as anyone with an account has noticed, has put a heavy focus on putting videos at the top of everyone’s news feeds as the potential for advertisements greatly increases with video. Pages with video are seeing a massive engagement bump as compared to those who only promote written content.

Vice is reporting that things have gotten extremely tricky for those who upload their content to YouTube, as ‘Freebooters’ have learned how to quickly download popular YouTube videos and re-upload them to Facebook to capture those valuable eyeballs. While Facebook doesn’t offer much monetization opportunities for these video uploads, people are very aware of the potential revenue stream that the social network will provide. In other words, getting there first is going to be extremely important.

These pages that aggregate these viral videos are going to be set to make massive profits when Facebook brings advertising options to video, inevitably a pivotal part of Facebook’s financial future.

Facebook has commented that they plan to try and minimize this piracy, but if YouTube has taught us anything, this is an incredibly difficult task. Frankly, if Google can’t crack the code, what makes Facebook confident it has the ability to effectively stop this ‘freebooting’ any better than the search giant?