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Adverts Mysteriously Appended to YouTube Clips

Posted by Zonk on Fri Feb 02, 2007 12:17 PM
from the should-have-thought-this-through dept.
The Internet
hey0you0guy writes "For the past few months copyrighted clips of shows have been edited to include advertisements for Gawker Media. These clips have been uploaded to the video sharing site YouTube by a user going by the handle Belowtheradar. These clips are then being linked to by Gawker itself: 'Gawker.com, for example, on Thursday featured a YouTube clip from ABC's talk show The View. At the beginning of the video, there is an ad for Gawker. On Wednesday, Valleywag posted a link to a video of television satirist Stephen Colbert talking about Wikipedia. At the beginning of that video there is an ad for Valleywag, a blog dedicated to Silicon Valley gossip.' CNet contacted the copyright holders for the videos (which range from NBC to Apple), and mostly received responses of 'we're looking into it.' At least two groups did confirm they did not give permission for this kind of advertisement."
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  • Adverts Mysteriously Appear in Inbox (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 02 2007, @12:20PM (#17861168)
    n/m

  • Probably... (Score:1)

    by Creepy Crawler (680178) on Friday February 02 2007, @12:20PM (#17861178)
    A "Ilikebees" kind of stealth advertising.

    I always knew that advertisers wanted eyeballs, but wouldnt think they'd gunk up a free vid site. Guess thats just high bandwidth spammers.
    • Re:Probably... by The Queen (Score:2) Friday February 02 2007, @12:25PM

    • Re:Probably... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Hijacked Public (999535) * on Friday February 02 2007, @12:30PM (#17861358)

      but wouldnt think they'd gunk up a free vid site


      Why would you think gunking up a free video site would give an advertiser pause? The only thing stopping them from physically grabbing your eyeballs and pointing them at their ads is that that kind of thing is illegal in most places.

      [ Parent ]
      • Re:Probably... by Creepy Crawler (Score:1) Friday February 02 2007, @12:55PM
    • Re:Probably... by Rebelgecko (Score:2) Friday February 02 2007, @06:55PM

  • Shocking! (Score:1)

    by ReidMaynard (161608) on Friday February 02 2007, @12:21PM (#17861196)
    (http://www.globaltics.net/)
    Corporations stoop to cheap, possible illegal advertizing gimics.
    • Re:Shocking! by TobyRush (Score:2) Friday February 02 2007, @01:57PM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • "mysterious"? by tverbeek (Score:3) Friday February 02 2007, @03:06PM
      • Re:"mysterious"? by Anonymous McCartneyf (Score:2) Friday February 02 2007, @09:11PM
    • Re:Shocking! by deathy_epl+ccs (Score:2) Friday February 02 2007, @01:39PM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

  • Legal fees (Score:2, Insightful)

    by t00le (136364) on Friday February 02 2007, @12:23PM (#17861218)
    We all know they have to come up with an interesting way to pay for all of the copyright lawsuits that are forthcoming.

  • it is mysterious (Score:5, Funny)

    by stoolpigeon (454276) <bittercode@gmail> on Friday February 02 2007, @12:24PM (#17861236)
    (http://thepeckfamily.us/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 10, @10:49AM)
    i wonder how they got there. i wonder if anyone will ever know. maybe leonard nimoy will do a show about it.

  • Will only get worse (Score:5, Insightful)

    by daeg (828071) on Friday February 02 2007, @12:26PM (#17861272)
    The problem will only get worse as (a) YouTube starts paying users to upload content (b) users keep uploading unauthorized copies of shows and (c) YouTube starts needing to generate profits and adds more advertisements such as pre- and post-stream ads.

    Why is this a problem? Now, instead of simply a DMCA takedown notice, YouTube is far more liable for damages because they made a direct profit off of the usage of unauthorized content. The users are more liable, too, since they will make a profit from YouTube.

  • Give them some credit (Score:5, Funny)

    by TodMinuit (1026042) <todminuit@noSPaM.gmail.com> on Friday February 02 2007, @12:26PM (#17861282)
    They didn't cause a bomb scare.

  • New spam? (Score:2)

    by name*censored* (884880) on Friday February 02 2007, @12:27PM (#17861304)
    I know people (if that's what you can call them) have been spamming for years, even before the internet - with telemarketers, junk mail and people handing out leaflets. But isn't this the first instance of someone advertising on ANOTHER person's content? With TV ads, the money advertisers give the station is given (in part) to the content providers.. junk mailers pay for their own paper, and even spam doesn't piggyback on legitimate emails (for the most part). IMHO, this is one of the lowest things they've done to date - they are completely destroying the already shaky advertising process by not themselves contributing towards their advertising costs (ie not paying content), ignoring the very minimal video editing and uploading costs). This isn't just another spam scam..

  • Opening ads (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hansamurai (907719) <hansamurai@gmail.com> on Friday February 02 2007, @12:28PM (#17861322)
    (http://www.thefirsthourblog.com/ | Last Journal: Monday September 10, @04:43PM)
    I really hope this is not going to be come common practice on Youtube. One of the reasons why Youtube is so great (and also probably why it is so successful) is because there are no pre-video ads. I hope that pre-video ads are only played if the user who is submitting the video chooses them to be played as part of some revenue sharing program that has been thrown around lately.
    • Re:Opening ads by Achromatic1978 (Score:3) Friday February 02 2007, @01:56PM
    • Re:Opening ads by Anonymous McCartneyf (Score:2) Friday February 02 2007, @09:23PM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

  • Oh noes (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ravear (923203) on Friday February 02 2007, @12:35PM (#17861430)
    I'm in ur tube... advertizing ur vid3oz
    • Re:Oh noes by Thaelon (Score:2) Friday February 02 2007, @03:02PM
      • Re:almost by User 956 (Score:2) Friday February 02 2007, @03:07PM

  • Like YouTube at the Micro Level (Score:5, Insightful)

    by N8F8 (4562) on Friday February 02 2007, @12:38PM (#17861472)
    Playing Devil's advocate I'd say this is a smaller scale version of what YouTube itself did. YouTube advertised itself with "borrowed" content to become famous and increase net value.
    • Re:Like YouTube at the Micro Level by TodMinuit (Score:2) Friday February 02 2007, @12:41PM

    • Re:Like YouTube at the Micro Level (Score:5, Funny)

      by The Ultimate Fartkno (756456) on Friday February 02 2007, @01:20PM (#17862258)
      Hey, you! You with the fancy logic and common sense! You get away from here with all that nonsense! This is Slashdot, fella, and we don't need someone coming around here and muddying up the message. YouTube runs on kitten farts and moonbeams, not MONEY! It represents the death of Big Entertainment and NOTHING ELSE! Power to the open-sourced people and death to the MPAA! Forget your shoveled-out Hollywood crap like Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men, the future of entertainment is in the hands of the masses and we are the future! Ten thousand videos of tweenage girls singing "Fergalicious" into soup ladles can't be wrong!

      FREEEEDOOOOMMMM!!
      [ Parent ]

    • Re:Like YouTube at the Micro Level (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MeanderingMind (884641) on Friday February 02 2007, @01:31PM (#17862468)
      (http://matoushin.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 24 2005, @09:28AM)
      I disagree. There is a fundamental difference here between what Youtube does and what the sleazy advertiser is doing.

      Youtube accepts videos from people, and posts them to their website which features ads.

      The sleazy advertiser is taking someone else's content, adding an advertisement into the content itself without permission, and reposting it.

      While both involve advertisement, Youtube doesn't claim they'll post your video to an ad-free website, and they certainly don't steal your videos off your hard drive without asking. It's a WYSIWYG situation, anyone who uses Youtube knows the webpage has ads. The sleaze, on the other hand, is presenting these videos as something they're not.
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:Like YouTube at the Micro Level by Popageorgio (Score:1) Friday February 02 2007, @05:11PM

  • Check the EULA (Score:2)

    by mpapet (761907) on Friday February 02 2007, @12:39PM (#17861492)
    (http://www.friendwich.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 09 2006, @12:05PM)
    I bet there's no way for an uploader to declare their content advert-free.

    No one saw this coming? Free is not a business model.

  • Read the terms, please (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gopal.V (532678) on Friday February 02 2007, @12:40PM (#17861508)
    (http://t3.dotgnu.info/ | Last Journal: Monday September 26 2005, @06:32AM)

    I assume a lot of people just click through the terms and conditions, but as a perpetual cynic (and coming from a family of legal folk), I generally have a quick read through. Here's an interesting excerpt from youtube terms [youtube.com]

    For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business,

    So, big surprise ! They've got a derievative work with an ad all over it. And I asked a lawyer. She said that that's pretty standard boilerplate, except hardly anyone modifies your content to include ads. The delivery of ads has been traditionally out of band of the content stream, but this makes sense.

  • A couple of things... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Evro (18923) <evandhoffman@g m a il.com> on Friday February 02 2007, @12:42PM (#17861536)
    (http://www.evanhoffman.com/ | Last Journal: Friday June 09 2006, @08:33AM)
    1) Where's the "mysterious" part? Someone's putting ads into the clip before uploading them. Nothing "mysterious."

    2) Appending means they're being tacked onto the end. If they're being added at the beginning, they're being prepended. Next time save the embarrassment and just say "added."

  • It's a guerilla marketing campaign! (Score:2)

    by wiredog (43288) on Friday February 02 2007, @12:44PM (#17861568)
    (Last Journal: Monday October 01 2001, @06:53PM)
    RUN!
  • The knee-jerk reaction is obviously to sue and see what happens.
    So we all just wait until a network sues, then see what happens.

  • Clock's Ticking Down (Score:2)

    by blueZhift (652272) on Friday February 02 2007, @12:52PM (#17861688)
    (http://bluezhift.proliphus.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday January 31 2007, @10:25AM)
    The clock is ticking down to the collapse of YouTube and similar sites, or the transformation of these sites into something quite different. The main problem here again is the fact that stuff gets posted without any real humans looking at it ahead of time. They can build all of the filters they want, we've already seen this with the old Napster. Unless postings are moderated before appearing, copyright abuses will continue to happen. Appended ads are just the latest twist. Eventually the courts are going to force YouTube to put the brakes on and humanly review all posted content, which, of course, will take a lot of time and change the way people use YouTube.

  • WELL NOW WE KNOW.... (Score:2)

    by 3seas (184403) on Friday February 02 2007, @12:55PM (#17861748)
    (http://threeseas.net/ | Last Journal: Friday January 18 2002, @01:44PM)
    How youtube is going to pay contributors...

  • Common practice, unlikely ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ace905 (163071) on Friday February 02 2007, @12:55PM (#17861756)
    (http://prettybored.com/)
    I think on the one hand, Gawker Media has gotten a *lot* of publicity from this - particularly after being discovered. Every news story on the incident has a link to their web page. But on the other hand, they now face a barrage of legal battles after admitting publicly that the uploader (belowtheradar) is '[their] video guy...'.

    I doubt anybody will follow in their footsteps once the courts make an example of them, and that is very likely to happen.

    In related news, The halfwit blowhard Amanda Congdon [10zenmonkeys.com] managed to get her little 'quote' of disdain in to the news article above ; so it's official, every worthless media-wh0&e not worth watching has gotten their 15 minutes of fame. Way to push the story.

    ---
    speaking of 15 minutes of fame [douginadress.com].

  • Big Deal (Score:1)

    by camg188 (932324) on Friday February 02 2007, @12:56PM (#17861768)
    Do a search for 'Terry Tate' on youtube and you will see actual full length commercials posted.
    • Re:Big Deal by Irish_Samurai (Score:2) Friday February 02 2007, @01:27PM

  • "Mysterious" gimme a break (Score:2)

    by DrSkwid (118965) on Friday February 02 2007, @12:57PM (#17861812)
    (http://www.milksucks.com/ | Last Journal: Monday September 15 2003, @12:30PM)
    What's mysterious about "user adds ads to video before uploading" ?

  • seems stupid (Score:2)

    by Some_Llama (763766) on Friday February 02 2007, @01:00PM (#17861868)
    (http://www.leap.cc/ | Last Journal: Monday September 10, @08:19PM)
    "These clips are then being linked to by Gawker itself: 'Gawker.com, for example, on Thursday featured a YouTube clip from ABC's talk show The View. At the beginning of the video, there is an ad for Gawker."

    If they are linking to the videos from the site that the ads are for, wouldn't people obviously already know about the site?!?

    Marketing for marketing sake?
  • 99 out of 100 people can be well behaved, but it takes only one asshat to stink up the whole place and make the experience miserable for everyone and ruin a forum's value or attract unwanted attention

    newsgroups, email, many news aggregator sites (not slashdot, thankfully): all it takes is 1 or 2 committed asshats to ruin the fun for everyone else. usually advertising and spam. they see their own aggrandizement at the sake of everyone else's misery, and they choose to make everyone else miserable for the sake of something selfish and smammler in importance

    it's predictable and inevitable that any utopian scheme that relies on everyone to behave nicely will fail. there's always one a**hole who will act like an a**hole. it's pretty much guaranteed. human nature is what it is. there's no vhanging or getting around it's good, it's bad, and it's ugly

    • Re:it's called the tragedy of the commons (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jfengel (409917) on Friday February 02 2007, @01:37PM (#17862568)
      (http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Monday November 03 2003, @03:59PM)
      Slashdot isn't a commons, at least not in its news articles. They're picked by editors. Those editors fail in a lot of ways (dups, slashvertisements, crappy grammar), but as you observe they keep up a reasonably interesting stream of articles.

      The comments are a commons, it's interesting that it's not too bad. One still sees occasional trolls, but several mechanisms weed them out: moderation, ignoring ACs, and Slashdot's filters. Eliminating graphical content helps, too.

      I'm still surprised that you don't find groups of trolls banding together to subvert that. It wouldn't be hard for several to make a few intelligent comments, acquire karma, and then burn it all to moderate an ascii-art goatse image to +5. Presumably this doesn't happen because there are too many real moderators pushing such idiocies down; the wealth of mod points is on their side.

      Wikipedia, too, is a commons where a combination of benign dictatorship (locking down controversial articles, banning troll users and unregistered users from some articles) and the general good-will to hide the trolls works to make the commons quite liveable.

      That doesn't work for most physical commons. Modding down a troll is cheap; cleaning up a polluted river or the air is expensive, and not amenable to many people putting in a little work.
      [ Parent ]

  • It must have something to do... (Score:2)

    by istartedi (132515) on Friday February 02 2007, @01:04PM (#17861924)
    (Last Journal: Thursday April 18 2002, @07:50PM)

    It must have something to do with that "opinion center" on Slashdot. Can somebody Tivo the Internet for me? Thanks.

  • you forgot the rest... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mister Whirly (964219) on Friday February 02 2007, @01:08PM (#17862018)
    (http://localhost/)
    "' CNet contacted the copyright holders for the videos (which range from NBC to Apple), and mostly received responses of 'we're looking into it.' At least two groups did confirm they did not give permission for this kind of advertisement."

    The two groups went on to say "And we are kicking ourselves for not thinking of it first!"

  • Hey Columbo... (Score:2)

    by writermike (57327) on Friday February 02 2007, @01:29PM (#17862436)
    Ahhhmmm, excuse me. Gosh, I just hate to bodder you. But, ahm, you know what really confuses me? The ads are there! YouTube put them there. How about that? Ahhhh well, it's probably nothing. Sorry to have boddered you.
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

  • Ads are everywhere... (Score:1)

    by bsundhei (1053360) on Friday February 02 2007, @01:38PM (#17862590)
    I hate that nowadays, if something exists, it MUST be advertised on. Hell, they even have trucks that drive around just to display ads. Not to mention the oh so smart people who get ads tatoo'd on themselves. I can understand that advertising can generate revenue, but there is a point where it becomes so obtrusive and annoying that it makes me not want to buy the product.

    Then again, people do say 'there is no such thing as bad publicity', and I just hope they are wrong. Let me live my life without advertisements everywhere I look, please.

  • My question is... (Score:1)

    by thousandinone (918319) on Friday February 02 2007, @02:51PM (#17863736)
    If you are hosting the file, and distributing it freely, how is it illegal to display an ad just before it? Lots of video sites display banner ads, and many others will display a short advertisement clip before the video itself loads. Are these also illegal?

  • Been Done Before (Score:2)

    by ewhac (5844) on Friday February 02 2007, @03:03PM (#17863906)
    (http://ewhac.best.vwh.net/ | Last Journal: Saturday August 18 2001, @10:28PM)
    Sounds a lot like eBaumsWorld, except that this prick isn't doing the hosting, but leeching off of YouTube's.

    Schwab

  • A simpler and more likely explanation (Score:1)

    by Whuffo (1043790) on Friday February 02 2007, @03:16PM (#17864092)
    (Last Journal: Saturday October 06, @02:25PM)
    If I was running a blog and wanted to save on bandwidth, getting YouTube to host the embedded videos would work great. Grab a video clip, stick on some identification, upload it to YouTube then embed it in the blog. Presto; streaming video without the cost.

    The identification added (they're not the only ones to do this by far) is usually done to discourage others from linking to the video and stealing bandwidth. In this case it appears that adding tags has become a habit.

    I don't see how one could complain about using YouTube this way - they DO offer free video hosting. What's more questionable is taking someone else's copyrighted work and altering it by adding a trailer, or embedding a logo in the JPEG, or a watermark, or whatever. That's not even close to ethical or legal...

  • It's GAWKER MEDIA that's doing it, people (Score:2)

    by tlhIngan (30335) <slashdot@@@worf...net> on Friday February 02 2007, @05:34PM (#17866544)
    Gawker media (who owns sites like lifehacker, gizmodo, valleywag, kotaku and others) is putting the ads in front of it. Go to Gizmodo and look at their videos - the Gizmodo produced ones will have Gizmodo ads on it.

    I believe it's Gawker media policy to do that for all Gawker-media originated (i.e., wasn't off some other (non-Gawker) blog) videos to put the ads in the front.

    I'm surprised it's come up now - Gizmodo has been doing this for a few months now...
  • 10 replies beneath your current threshold.

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