September 16, 2009 1:16 PM
- Text
Another Way MTV Is Missing Out With Its Kanye West Clip
(MoneyWatch) 
Now that I've gotten your attention with this silly visual, I'd like to bring up another problem with MTV not having its clips on YouTube: by not being integrated onto platforms outside of its site, it misses out on the often engaging back-and-forth that happens when user-generated content takes on content from professional media properties; it's keeping itself separate from online activity that only fuels watching of its content, and potential revenue. (MTV is hardly alone on this, but right now it's a particularly apt example. While it's great that Hulu aggregates major media content, there's something to be said for the vox populi, which is missing there too because of its positioning as a site for professional content.)
To see what I mean, go take a stroll over to YouTube and search under "Kanye West Taylor Swift." You'll get over 16,000 results, and given the different musical stylings of the two, you can bet that a week ago, it was a fraction of that. Not only, as I've pointed out earlier, are the illicit posters of the video the only ones getting any direct benefit from the showdown between the two on the Video Music Awards, but then there are the scores of video responses, some of them ad-supported, that are making hay out of this. Meanwhile, over at MTV.com, with the exception of a text comment stream, there's not much going on. It's as though video responses, not to mention visuals like the one above, don't exist.
Of course, in MTV's case, its absence right now from YouTube is partly about a suit between its parent, Viacom, and Google/YouTube over copyright issues, but here's the strange twist: most of the user-generated clips that talk about the Kanye West/Taylor Swift incident don't abuse copyrights in any way. The smart media company would ask YouTube if they could aggregate their own content with the responses from fans and sell the entire freakin' thing as an ad package, maybe even giving revenue cuts to a few of the most popular. Naw. That idea is just too sensible for it to happen.
Visual from Tommy Oliver via Mashable.
Previous coverage of online video at BNET Media:
Now that I've gotten your attention with this silly visual, I'd like to bring up another problem with MTV not having its clips on YouTube: by not being integrated onto platforms outside of its site, it misses out on the often engaging back-and-forth that happens when user-generated content takes on content from professional media properties; it's keeping itself separate from online activity that only fuels watching of its content, and potential revenue. (MTV is hardly alone on this, but right now it's a particularly apt example. While it's great that Hulu aggregates major media content, there's something to be said for the vox populi, which is missing there too because of its positioning as a site for professional content.)To see what I mean, go take a stroll over to YouTube and search under "Kanye West Taylor Swift." You'll get over 16,000 results, and given the different musical stylings of the two, you can bet that a week ago, it was a fraction of that. Not only, as I've pointed out earlier, are the illicit posters of the video the only ones getting any direct benefit from the showdown between the two on the Video Music Awards, but then there are the scores of video responses, some of them ad-supported, that are making hay out of this. Meanwhile, over at MTV.com, with the exception of a text comment stream, there's not much going on. It's as though video responses, not to mention visuals like the one above, don't exist.
Of course, in MTV's case, its absence right now from YouTube is partly about a suit between its parent, Viacom, and Google/YouTube over copyright issues, but here's the strange twist: most of the user-generated clips that talk about the Kanye West/Taylor Swift incident don't abuse copyrights in any way. The smart media company would ask YouTube if they could aggregate their own content with the responses from fans and sell the entire freakin' thing as an ad package, maybe even giving revenue cuts to a few of the most popular. Naw. That idea is just too sensible for it to happen.
Visual from Tommy Oliver via Mashable.
Previous coverage of online video at BNET Media:
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