Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2015. It reports news from that month, including SketchShe’s subscriber count of just over 600,000 and video figures. Those figures, and Facebook’s handling of re-uploaded videos and its ad model, have all changed since.
Creating a YouTube channel can be a very profitable business if you get a large number of subscribers and your videos are watched by millions of people. And every YouTuber wants their videos shared on as many social networks as possible, to gain popularity that way.
But Facebook is costing channel owners many millions, and therefore Google itself, which shares its advertising revenue with the creators.
I imagine most of you already know SketchShe, the well-known trio of young women who usually lip-sync to music videos in different outfits or costumes.
This group, with just over 600,000 subscribers to its channel, shows the serious problem YouTubers face because of Facebook’s lax rules on intellectual property.
The group has a video that has been played 29 million times on YouTube, which isn’t bad at all and will have earned them a fair amount of advertising revenue.
The problem is that the video has been shared more than 200 million times on Facebook, according to The Wall Street Journal, and the women won’t see a cent from those plays. YouTubers earn money from the ads that run before their videos, and that ad system doesn’t work on Facebook.
In other words, the moment the video is taken to Facebook, the advertising disappears, so the YouTubers lose and Google loses.
Clearly, when Facebook users share a YouTube video they don’t mean to harm the channel’s creators; quite the opposite. But YouTubers also run into other, perhaps more damaging users: the viral pages that download videos and take them over. When one of these pages, with 3 to 5 million fans on Facebook or more, gets hold of a YouTuber’s video, it can make it one of the most-watched videos around, even more watched than the original on the YouTube channel itself, yet the channel owner won’t see any income from the millions of views on Facebook.
According to TechInsider, the women’s creative producer has tried to contact certain Facebook pages and users who habitually steal his clients’ content, downloading the videos and uploading them to Facebook without the creators’ consent.
The talks went nowhere, and Facebook is unable to act quickly on the problem. On the occasions when it does act and removes a video (which happens very rarely), by the time it does so the damage is already done.
Ultimately, the solution would lie with Facebook users themselves. But 90% of Facebook users are unaware (they can’t be aware, since they don’t know how this world works) of the harm they do when they share content from so-called viral pages, which win millions of fans using nothing but content created by others, whether we’re talking about videos, memes or articles.
See also: Tips and steps to make money with a YouTube channel
Featured image: BrokenSphere, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
