Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Adverts Mysteriously Appended to YouTube Clips

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the should-have-thought-this-through dept.

hey0you0guy writes "For the past few months copyrighted clips of shows have been edited to include advertisements for Gawker Media. These clips have been uploaded to the video sharing site YouTube by a user going by the handle Belowtheradar. These clips are then being linked to by Gawker itself: 'Gawker.com, for example, on Thursday featured a YouTube clip from ABC's talk show The View. At the beginning of the video, there is an ad for Gawker. On Wednesday, Valleywag posted a link to a video of television satirist Stephen Colbert talking about Wikipedia. At the beginning of that video there is an ad for Valleywag, a blog dedicated to Silicon Valley gossip.' CNet contacted the copyright holders for the videos (which range from NBC to Apple), and mostly received responses of 'we're looking into it.' At least two groups did confirm they did not give permission for this kind of advertisement."

5 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Opening ads by hansamurai · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I really hope this is not going to be come common practice on Youtube. One of the reasons why Youtube is so great (and also probably why it is so successful) is because there are no pre-video ads. I hope that pre-video ads are only played if the user who is submitting the video chooses them to be played as part of some revenue sharing program that has been thrown around lately.

    --
    Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
    1. Re:Opening ads by Achromatic1978 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      And of course the hundreds of terabytes a month of bandwidth that such a site chews through, that gets paid for out of what, the goodness of the host's heart?

  2. Re:Probably... by Hijacked+Public · · Score: 5, Interesting

    but wouldnt think they'd gunk up a free vid site


    Why would you think gunking up a free video site would give an advertiser pause? The only thing stopping them from physically grabbing your eyeballs and pointing them at their ads is that that kind of thing is illegal in most places.

    --
    "Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
  3. Re:New spam? by SQLGuru · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Certain spam *DOES* piggy back on legitimate e-mail.

    Taken from some forwarded jokes.

    Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com/

    Do You Yahoo!?
      Bid and sell for free at http://auctions.yahoo.com/
    Layne
  4. "mysterious"? by tverbeek · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What's mysterious about this? Did anyone actually expect people uploading other people's material to YouTube to be ethical?

    --
    http://alternatives.rzero.com/