YouTube have been experimenting with advertising on videos for a good few months now, and by all accounts, it;s been quite successful.

The video sharing site has now decided to grow its pilot advertising revenue sharing program to encompass interested parties in the general public.

The company, owned by Google, was known for several months to operate a limited, roughly 100-user program to formulate a system by which registered site members would be given a percentage – presumably quite small – of advertising income generated via AdSense.

According to YouTube, however, the site “will now accept partner applications from users in the US and Canada.”

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Google’s time limit for user-submitted videos uploaded to YouTube is well established, and known by almost everyone these days. Ten minutes. That’s it. No more. 

Have twenty minutes or more of highlights from that Little League baseball game you want to share with the family via the video hosting website? It ain’t happening. 

At least not in one whole shot. Long-form podcasts? Nien!

And we all know why that cutoff point was established some time ago. To combat piracy and copyright violations and whatnot. 

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A ComScore report has further confirmed what we all suspected, that Google YouTube completely dominates the online video market.

The report covered September 2007, and looked at which sites people used to view videos on, as well as other ongoing trends in the Internet video market.

YouTube Completely Dominant

Google sites, which basically means YouTube, account for nearly 30% of videos viewed on the Internet. The next nearest competitors are Fox and Yahoo! with just over 4% each.

YouTube’s dominance can clearly be seen by looking at the statistics. Over 70 million people viewed more than 2.5 billion videos on the site, and that was just in September.

The full table can be viewed here.

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Google have announced they are to partner with Nielsen, the company which measures television ratings across various demographics.

Nielsen has set top boxes in a large number of American households, and these will now be used to see how many people watch the television adverts that Google sell.

This is an agreement designed to help companies who have already purchased Google ads determine what sort of value for money they are getting, as well as entice potential new advertisers in to signing up with the company.

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A host of media companies have launched a new push to force user generated content sites such as YouTube to tighten up their copyright controls.

Disney, CBS, NBC, and Fox, along with Microsoft, Veoh, and Dailymotion, have jointly issued a document they call “User Generated Content Principles.” 

In a nutshell, the guidelines call for sites hosting UGC to automatically block content that matches copyrighted material submitted by copyright owners to a back-end database.

Nothing New

These aren’t new proposals—the studios have been pressing for automated filtering on YouTube and the like for quote some time now. But the presentation of these proposals as a set of “principles” is new, and somewhat misleading.

Typically, we see voluntary guidelines issued by industry groups as a self-regulatory measure, to ensure best practices are followed in the absence of regulation. But here, it’s not self-regulation—the biggest names in the UGC business aren’t there. 

Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Yahoo are all noticeably absent from the video sharing services, as are a number of other channels for UGC, like blogs and other forums that allow the posting of media. Those who are present are those who would seek to regulate the business of others.

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Under pressure from movie studios, record labels and their friends on Capitol Hill to filter out copyrighted material, YouTube’s parent company Google has developed a tool that will likely restrict the flow of legal content over the Internet.

YouTube introduced the beta version of its ‘video identification’ system a few days ago, the purpose of which is to control the amount of infringing material that appears on the site. 

This raises the bar for each and every entity that serves as a conduit for copyrighted works online, and was most liekly prompted by the $1 billion lawsuit from Viacom.

How It Works

A copyright holder uploads its works into a reference database, which then generates identification files by which uploaded videos are matched. When a user uploads a video onto YouTube, that video is matched with the identification file. 

If there is a “match” (more on that later), then the video is subject to whatever action the rights holder has decided to apply to it; for example, it could be blocked, “tracked” or “monetized.” If the video is blocked, the user will be notified, and can immediately contest the claim by clicking onto a link. 

Once YouTube receives the user contest, it will put the video back on the site. At that point, notice and takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) would kick in. 

If the copyright holder continues to want the video removed, it would have to send a takedown notice required by the DMCA. The user can send a counter-notice, whereupon the video would be reinstated, etc.

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Originally planned for a September release, the fabled YouTube antipiracy tool has finally appeared, according to Webware.

Due to the controversy and bad press being created by a swathe of copyright lawsuits, Google hinted at the development of a new breed of video recognition technology for YouTube back in June.

This new technology was meant to help the curb the posting of copyrighted material onto the video community.

This new tool, however, is not a completely automated process and, without the help of content owners, may not be able to catch 100% of the copyright videos that are constantly making their way to YouTube viewers.

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