Facebook is cheating…again
Here it comes, another streaming service. It’s pretty obvious that one day, in the near future, we will be getting most of our media from a small group of tech companies. When I say small, it’s pretty much three; Google (YouTube); Amazon (Prime Video); and Netflix (I’d put Apple in there as well but Apple TV is still looking pretty weak compared to the competition) and now there’s a new major player in the game - Facebook. And they’re cheating! Well, they’re all cheating in some way or another but Facebook is just outright being evil. As always, Let me explain.
Television is on the decline and studios are feeling the heat from the the tech giant’s mission to build a platform for both content creation and consumption, and of course YouTube reigns supreme as the king. We’ve all heard the statistics of how many hours we spend watching YouTube videos and how how much content is uploaded each day. The millennials, especially, have pretty much all migrated towards getting their entertainment from YouTube. Although the engagement rate for YouTube is pretty high, content quality is pretty low when you compare it to the likes of major television studios like HBO or the BBC. At one point, YouTube thought they could compete by creating a standalone service, YouTube Red, expecting people to actually pay for such mediocre content. Netflix and Amazon, on the other hand, are bringing out incredibly great, high-quality, exclusive TV shows and movies such as Mr. Robot, House of Cards and Beasts of No Nation, just to name but a few. YouTube is also trying to enter the quality route, but… well, it’s got a long way to go.
Facebook is the biggest social platform in the world, with more than 1billion active users. For a couple of years now Facebook has allowed stolen videos, mainly from YouTube, to be uploaded onto their platform by fake accounts set up for these exact practises. Why is this a problem? Well, aside from the fact that the videos are stolen, Facebook has also began rolling out this…
Facebook TV is indeed happening.
Now, of course, Facebook argues that it’s just a “platform” and they cannot control everything their billions of users post on the site. Which everyone cries out ‘Bullshit! Facebook is lying to us’. They encourage these account (pirate accounts) to download videos from YouTube to then be re-upload on Facebook’s own site. Why? Because when content creators upload their videos on YouTube, they post a link on their Facebook page to direct their followers to their YouTube channel to watch the video. Of course Facebook does not like users being taken off their site, so those who post videos on Facebook’s native player are reward with an extra boost of reachability. This gives video pirates an opportunity to steal the relevant video from YouTube, re-post on it using Facebook’s native video play, then sit back and watch it spread across the site while also receiving checks from Facebook for monetisation
Business Insider reports that in the first quarter of 2015, 725 of the 1,000 most viewed videos on Facebook were “stolen” from the original content creators and re-uploaded to Facebook’s native video player. That’s more than 17 billion stolen views in the period and that was just in 2015. This leads on to the next problem. As there are a lot of people using Facebook each day, content creators now lose out in the amount of users they can reach. Now, almost all the people who can see the video have already seen it, on Facebook, which means that most of the money they could have made from the video has been lost. Stolen would be a better term.
Now if you come across someone else posting your videos on Facebook without your permission, is there a way to get Facebook to remove it? Yes! But good luck with that. Facebook has purposely made the progress of notifying them about stolen content is both long and complicated. By the time the video has been removed, it had has reached all the eyes it could ever reach and the money that could’ve been made has now been lost. Would Facebook be willing to pay back the amount owned from monetisation back to you? No.
Let’s not forget these celebrities who purposely steal content and re-post them, getting millions of views and money along the way.
