YouTube’s Copyright Problems Overblown

Out of 6,725 most viewed YouTube videos 621 or 9.23 percent were removed because of reported copyright violations. The removed videos received a total of 94,187,203 views and accounted for 5.93 percent of the most viewed videos over the last three months.

For the study Vidmeter kept track of the most watched YouTube videos noting the day, week, month and the most watched videos of all time. Information on each video such as number of views, the name, and the copyright holder was collected from each video’s URL. The study is based on sample and not the site as a whole.

The top five videos that were removed by Viacom’s request were music videos. Other popular videos that were removed were Comedy Central clips of the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and South Park.

The study concluded that unauthorized copyright videos on YouTube make up a small percentage of the sites most popular videos and a smaller portion of views. The majority of the videos were short clips such as music videos, comedy sketches and sporting events.

While Viacom should certainly defend their copyrighted material the results of this sample study bring to light that the problem of copyrighted violations is not as widespread as originally thought. Still though a problem does exist and will continue to be an issue until YouTube provides a solution.

They’ve taken it one step further and now have a free service called Vidmeter Tracker that allows anyone to track their own videos or videos that they’re interested in and see statistics on these videos across 23 different video sites.

It works by entering in the URL of where the video is located on the various video sites, and then Tracker starts compiling data for you and updating it daily. You can get the data by logging in to Tracker, subscribing to an RSS feed for the video’s stats, or having it email you and your colleagues email reports.

What does it track?

• All-time views and comments combined
• All-time views and comments on each video site
• Graph and chart of traffic trends for the last 20 days
• Shows the video in a flash player within their interface

Screenshots
Click the thumbnails to view screenshots of the Tracker interface:

What sites can you track on?

• Atom Films
• Bolt
• Clip Shack
• Break.com
• my.break.com
• Brightcove
• Daily Motion
• Google Video
• Guba
• Grouper
• Hi5
• iFilm
• Game Trailers
• Kill Some Time
• Live Video
• Metacafe
• Myspace
• Revver
• Veoh
• Vimeo
• vMix
• vSocial
• Yahoo
• Youtube
• Zippy

What’s also really cool about Tracker is that you don’t have to be the person who submitted the video to the video sites. So it’s a great way to track videos of your competition or just track videos you may be interested in to see how much traffic they’re getting and from where.

Overall, Tracker is very easy to use and well done. It feels like a surefire winner to me for all the new video content producers to have their own version of web analytics. Let the Video Analytics era begin.

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