Disqus - Latest Comments for Gary

Re: Dembot - More Videoblogging

Gary — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:13:56 -0000

It's like I've been saying for the last three years. Making entertaining video is a highly skilled job and most people don't have the time, inclination or ability to learn how to do it. A few do.

Just as giving someone a pencil doesn't turn them into a best-selling author in 99.999% of cases, giving someone a video camera and a means of distribution doesn't turn them into a film-maker that people will want to watch. In fact it's even worse with video as most of us learn to write at school, but few of us learn any film-making skills.

People have been making amateur films since film was invented more than 100 years ago, showing them to family, friends and at local film clubs and, guess what, nearly all of those films were unwatchable for the same reasons outlined above.

Now it's clear that no one is clicking on ads within videos. Again, not a big surprise, because video is linear and the ads are invasive in a way that Google ads on a web page are not. The click through rate on ads within video is a tiny fraction of that with Adsense on a page.

For that reason, the biggest con has been RSS, because film makers have been persuaded to separate their videos from their web pages. This has led to numerous scammy sites such as Mefeedia serving up their own Google ads alongside the best video content from hundreds of film makers, most of whom had no choice in the matter because the content was lifted from the RSS feed.

Mefeedia says it doesn't store content from the feed, but strangely has content that I removed from my website more than two years ago.

Guess what, because Mefeedia has great content from hundreds of sites, Google likes Mefeedia better than your own site. So you find yourself ranked below Mefeedia on Google on exactly the same keywords (because Mefeedia copies ALL your text, tags and headlines).

The amount of links back to your site from these scammers varies from none to one on each post. But checking back through my logs I found only 19 hits from Mefeedia in 9 months, while in the same period their site had pulled hotlinked (ie. stolen) video files from my server thousands of times. If people won't click on an actual link to your site then you can forget type in traffic from the URL on your videos. And why should they visit anyway, when they can get every bit of your content at Mefeedia?

Note how none of the blog software gives the option to turn off RSS completely and there is intense pressure not to output partial feeds (I wonder who is really driving that?).

Because the promised video ad revenue hasn't happened, there is NO benefit to having the same video and same metadata on dozens of video sites. Google penalises for duplicate content and if you have your videos on your own web page alongside your own Google ads, it is costing you bigtime in lost Adsense revenue.

Re: Embedding is not Aiding and Abetting

Gary — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:13:31 -0000

What's your view on sites such as Mefeedia that embed videos and serve up Google Adsense ads alongside, regardless of what licence the video was released under (standard copyright, Creative Commons no commercial use)?

Is it right that a site that has contributed nothing to that video -- neither making it, nor paying the hosting costs for the file -- should, through bulk of content 'lifted', become the number one destination for viewing that file and therefore make the most income from it?

Re: Embedding is not Aiding and Abetting

Gary — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:16:18 -0000

The difference with Google cache is that it presents our pages with our Adsense ads on them. Also it isn't presented as a destination in its own right in the way Mefeedia is.

Mefeedia lifts all the text from the RSS feed and republishes it with hotlinked and embedded video files. It creates completely new pages from our content (I don't have ads in the RSS feed but I bet they mysteriously don't make it onto Mefeedia). We all know the way filesharing sites hide away the links back to the originating site and some don't provide links back at all. The amount of type in traffic from those links is tiny.

My experience with Mefeedia is that I emailed them a couple of months ago and received no reply. Eventually I issued a DMCA and they were not very co-operative. They removed the embedded videos but left up all the titles and tags -- an obvious attempt to keep on depriving us of Google traffic on the same data.

Last week I discovered that they had reinstated all those embedded file that were on blip.tv and YouTube. Also they were displaying one of our videos embedded from blip.tv and showing a 'creative commons' licence underneath it. When none of our videos have every been released with a creative commons licence.

They told us that if we wanted them to stop displaying videos that we had hosted on blip.tv and YouTube, we would have to remove our videos from those services.

Now remember, Mefeedia is a company that is profiting by serving up ads alongside our videos. So now the solution to theft is supposedly not to make your work or product available at all because Mefeedia can't help itself from stealing.

The very least Mefeedia could do under the cuircumstances is take down our content when requested. But no, by the start of this week they were still playing games, asking for lists of files, when we had already given them that info. So we went to Google Adsense with a complaint and lo-and-behold the files were delinked within hours. So that's a tip for what works.

All the titles, descriptions and thumbnails are still up, even though they have been changed on YouTube and blip.tv. Mefeedia says it doesn't store content but recently had the full text of one entry that we removed from the site in 2006.

I don't think this is an honest company.

Re: Embedding is not Aiding and Abetting

Gary — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:24:19 -0000

I'll just add that we are happy for our videos to be embedded for none profit/non-commercial purposes and it's extremely sad to have to restrict embedding from YouTube. Unfortunately almost nobody respects the licence we have chosen to give.

Last year I was involved in running a non-profit arts and community event and we put up some of the content from that on blip.tv and YouTube. No one who was involved in appearing or running that event was paid or profited.

But guess who is profiting from everyone's hard work? Yes Mefeedia, a company that isn't even in the same country, because it is serving up those videos alongside Adsense too.

Re: Embedding is not Aiding and Abetting

Gary — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:47:37 -0000

I take your point, though there are no ads on that Google Video page.

Really the issue is that ads embedded in the video are not working well so far and everyone is pinning their hopes on that changing. If it doesn't then there is no longterm revenue stream for those people who distribute in this way.

Shooting your content out to numerous other sites, all of which then have the same titles, tags and description, is damaging for the health of your own website as it ceases to be a destination.

I know we can argue about how the future is not individual websites being destinations. But the fact is that Google Adsense on a page is currently a great revenue stream. The fact is that I have made more from Google Adsense ads next to videos embedded on my own website in one day, that I have from ads within the video served from on blip.tv.

No disrespect to blip.tv, because I think they are a great company and one of my favourites.

Re: Embedding is not Aiding and Abetting

Gary — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:50:41 -0000

Sorry, that should read: I have made more from Google Adsense ads next to videos embedded on my own website in one day, than I have in a year from ads within the same videos served from blip.tv.

Re: Video-blogging isn’t for everyone

Gary — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 17:36:17 -0000

If you didn't know how to use a keyboard or a pencil or you had never learnt how to read and write, you would find that the written word didn't work for you. You would show people some random scribbles and, when they failed to communicate your ideas, you might give up. On the other hand you might set about learning how to communicate effectively using words.

Video-making is also a language. One that, unlike the written word, most of us are never taught. Watching films and TV is not a way to learn video-making any more than having someone read stories to you is a way of learning to read and write yourself.

What we seeing are video blogs made by people who know little about the 'language' of video. And, surprise, they aren't very effective.

Re: 2008/03/20/mefeedia/

Gary — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:53:54 -0000

Mefeedia takes all your text content from the RSS feed, your titles, all your tags and it republishes all of this on its site, embedding the video alongside - which will be hotlinked from your server.

This is all served up alongside Mefeedia's own Google Adsense ads. It's theft.

This is about taking away your content, getting a higher ranking than your site on Google and having visitors go to Mefeedia rather than you.

Try asking them to remove anything. These people are worse than YouTube.