Does Facebook Steal Video Impressions?
Facebook sees on average 8 billion video views a day.
In Q1 of 2015 725 of 1000 of the most viewed videos on Facebook were claimed to be stolen. This pans out to 17 billion views! What happens is that content aggregates steal a viral video from the source so that they can go viral on the Facebook platform. Here is how it works:
Recap:
A view is counted as 3 seconds even if the video was muted. Think about it, how many auto play videos do you just scroll past when facebooking? This leads to an overall lack of engagement by users and makes views an inflated metric even though the large quantity is “impressive”.
The real issue is freebooting which is the stealing of videos. Naturally, facebook prefers it’s own player so more views may flock to the facebook video player instead of the original youtube link where the content creater would make their advertising revenue.
Smartereveryday’s videos are stolen all the time getting viewed up to 17 million times without the publisher recieving any of that traffic and generating no revenue.
Sucessful viral Video’s take a lot of time, money and effort to create and when they are pirated, the creator can lose all of their profit and possibly go out of business
YouTube has a robust system for detecting and removing pirated content and is not really a problem. Face book needs to respond and put measures in place!
Process of Claiming Copyright on Facebook
- Get an email or tweet from a fan since you cannot search for your stolen videos and it needs to basically be brought to your attention
- Search for Facebook copyright infringement on google since its faster this way. Here is the link for the Facebook Copyright Help Center
- Fill out a copyright claim form
- Views on your stolen video are rising
- Facebook finally pulls the video
Further Resources: