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How Major Film Studios Manipulate YouTube Users
An anonymous reader writes "A year before the major movie companies were offered the chance by YouTube to 'block, monetize or track' uploaded copyrighted material, studios such as Disney were already commissioning PR companies to create bogus YouTube users — complete with authentically 'trendy' semi-literate user-profiles, on accounts that appeared to be set up by young and 'edgy' teenagers. These faux 'users' were able to post high-definition videos from copyrighted movies without being penalised or impeded by YouTube's Content ID algorithms, and their posts, deliberately crammed with piracy-related search terms and timed (even to the day, in one case) to coincide with related DVD and Blu-ray releases, sometimes accrue a million and a half hits or more, whilst those of genuine YouTube uploaders fall at the site's Content ID firewall. This article looks at how the major studios have reacted to YouTube in the last four years, and also examines in-depth three such examples of apparent 'astroturfing' involving the theatrical or disc releases of Toy Story 2, Speed Racer and Spider-Man 3."
Actually, I would argue that those studies are exactly why the film industry hates piracy.
Look at it like this: they're a business. Businesses want a steady revenue stream. Ideally, entertainment becomes a machine - 1x money goes in one end, and 1.5x money comes out the other end, no matter what. If sometimes, unpredictably, when you put 1x money in 1.1x money comes out, that's bad - but so is putting 1x money in and getting 2x money out. Unpredictability in general is bad, even if it ends up working out in your favor.
How do businesses combat unpredictability? With marketing. By molding how people perceive your product, you tune the machine; yes, you make its output higher, but you also make the output range narrower - you remove the unpredictability from the market. I bet that one of marketing's greatest victories in the modern era has been to convince people that its goal is simply to improve sales at any cost, not to stabilize them.
This is clearly very important to almost every business, but especially entertainment. I mean, just look at the budget for any major game or movie - there's quite frequently an even split in resources allocated to making the thing and advertising the thing - which, to a business, means that they think advertising is at least as important as the actual product.
So where does piracy come in? It's the equivalent of millions of dollars spent on marketing, that the business has absolutely no control over. That makes type-A CEOs flip out - not because they're losing sales, but because, in essence, they've lost control of something. And they have good reason to, a lot of the time - instead of consumers being hit with a carefully crafted marketing message that frames the product in exactly the right way, they're just exposed directly to the product itself. Remember that budget allocation? Piracy literally makes half of what the company spent on bringing the product to market useless.
So yeah. Those studies that say piracy might actually increase sales? Businesses don't give a shit. What they care about is the unauthorized marketing, which adds unpredictability to their income and makes a large part of the resources they spend meaningless.