The New York Times today has a piece about a handful of CGM video sites that, it implies, are moving in on YouTube and MySpace turf now that those sites are policing video content and enforcing copyright protections (or trying to anyway).
The story mentions sites including France’s Dailymotion (where “hours of copyrighted material” like entire recent TV show episodes, along with lots of skin can be found), current events exposé-oriented site LiveLeak, and Stickam, (where “users broadcast live video of themselves and conduct face-to-face video chats with other users.” LiveLeak is the only one that appears to run ads — text ads; according to the Times story, they do that through the adbrite network. Evidently, not much monitoring for explicit material or copyright infringement is happening on these sites.
It’s copyright protection and, perhaps more important, uncontroversial content that will draw real ad dollars to such sites. And, as I wrote in a post early last month, policing content could be the downfall of any site in the CGM video category:
Fact is, what made YouTube cool is its rule-flouting attitude….It took less than a year for them to go from affirming their street cred by pissing off NBC over the Lazy Sunday brouhaha to opening their Tubularms wide to embrace the stodgy old media suits when they finally came around, tails between legs.
….[N]ow that the company is beholden to [big TV netorks]…and its newly-adoptive public parent, YouTube’s easy-going ‘tude is bound to change. That’s when the wilier unchained guys swoop in.