'I now pronounce you monetized'
YouTube managers tell tale of win-win in wake of hyper-viral wedding video
By Paul McNamara on Thu, 07/30/09 - 4:02pm.
If there's anything worse than a fabulous YouTube video being pulled off-line over a copyright beef it might be a content creator not being fairly compensated for the use of his or her work. (Hey, consider my line of work.)
So it's kind of cool to see both sides win in the case of "Jill and Kevin's Big Day" wedding video vs. Chris Brown's hit recording "Forever."
Before that gets explained, though, if you haven't seen the video, take a moment: I promise you will not be disappointed.
What great fun ... at least until the video went hyper-viral. YouTube's Chris LaRosa, technical account manager, and Ali Sandler, music partner manager, explain in a blog post headlined: "I now pronounce you monetized: a YouTube video case study."
Last week the world watched in wonder as Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz's wedding party transformed a familiar and predictable tradition into something spontaneous and just flat-out fun. The video, set to R&B star Chris Brown's hypnotic dance jam "Forever," became an overnight sensation, accumulating more than 10 million views on YouTube in less than one week.
The video rocketed to the tops of social media sites such as Digg and Reddit. The wedding party participants were instant TV morning-show stars, too.
But Chris Brown had yet to be heard from. More from LaRosa and Sandler:
At YouTube, we have sophisticated content management tools in place to help rights holders control their content on our site. The rights holders for "Forever" used these tools to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes. As a result, the rights holders were able to capitalize on the massive wave of popularity generated by "JK Wedding Entrance Dance" - in the last week, searches for "Chris Brown Forever" on YouTube have skyrocketed, making it one of the most popular queries on the site.
This traffic is also very engaged - the click-through rate (CTR) on the "JK Wedding Entrance" video is 2x the average of other Click-to-Buy overlays on the site. And this newfound interest in downloading "Forever" goes beyond the viral video itself: "JK Wedding Entrance" also appears to have influenced the official "Forever" music video, which saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x in the last week.
And everyone lives happily ever after.
(Update: A regular reader just pointed me to this interesting discussion at TechDirt where people are wondering why the wedding party itself isn't getting a cut of the action.)Welcome regulars and passersby. Here are a few more recent Buzzblog items. And, if you'd like to receive Buzzblog via e-mail newsletter, here's where to sign up.
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About Time...
It's about time that content owners decided that rather that limiting the use of their content, they decided to find a way to make money off of it. Hopefully this will help those content owners think first about removing their content, and rather asking the question: how can I make money off of this?
Looks like J&K are at least
Looks like J&K are at least able to get ad revenue from their site, but for some reason, Google's algo places ads for sex offender reports and (dubious) church insurance on the page instead of, say, wedding ads.
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