Looks Like Facebook Is Building Its Own Content ID

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the that'll-go-over-just-great dept

YouTube star (among other things) Hank Green recently wrote an interesting post slamming Facebook for the way it treats video makers like himself. He has a few specific complaints, including that Facebook creates major incentives for people to upload videos directly to Facebook rather than just linking/embedding from other platforms (basically Facebook will bury your non-native videos) and that Facebook plays some questionable tricks in determining what counts as a “view” allowing it to claim more video views than YouTube when the truth is probably that it has about 1/5 as many views. But Hank’s biggest complaint is that because of the incentives for native views, it’s quite common for people to take other people’s YouTube videos and upload them to Facebook themselves — and that Facebook is not very responsive to takedown requests:

According to a recent report from Ogilvy and Tubular Labs, of the 1000 most popular Facebook videos of Q1 2015, 725 were stolen re-uploads. Just these 725 “freebooted” videos were responsible for around 17 BILLION views last quarter. This is not insignificant, it?s the vast majority of Facebook?s high volume traffic. And no wonder, when embedding a YouTube video on your company?s Facebook page is a sure way to see it die a sudden death, we shouldn?t be surprised when they rip it off YouTube and upload it natively. Facebook?s algorithms encourage this theft.

What is Facebook doing about it?

They?ll take the video down a couple days after you let them know. Y?know, once it?s received 99.9% of the views it will ever receive.

Leaving aside whether or not you think this is a big deal, what’s really interesting is the first comment (highlighted by Fred von Lohmann) which suggests Facebook is gearing up to launch its own ContentID-like system. The comment is from Matt Pakes, a Facebook product manager for its video products. He responds to each of Green’s complaints, putting a pro-Facebook spin on each of them (though, those responses appear to be a little questionable) and then indicates that the company is getting ready to launch something new, a la ContentID, but made special for Facebook:

Finally, we take intellectual property rights very seriously. We have used the Audible Magic system for years to help prevent unauthorized video content on Facebook. We also provide reporting tools for content owners to report possible copyright infringement. As video continues to grow rapidly on Facebook, we?re actively exploring further solutions to help IP owners identify and manage potential infringing content, tailored for our unique platform and ecosystem. This is a significant technical challenge at our scale, but we have a team working on it and expect to have more to share later this summer.

Of course, as Hank pointed out in his original article, the reason why some content creators actually like ContentID isn’t so much the fact that you can pull down copied videos, but because it’s created a revenue stream for them that goes back to the original creators. It’s not at all clear how Facebook could even do that:

But even if they do have a system, it won?t function as well as Content ID. Content ID works so well largely because YouTube is good at monetizing content. So, instead of taking a video down, a copyright holder can claim the video and receive revenue from it. Content ID has claimed millions of videos and is responsible for over a billion dollars in revenue so copyright holders love it. But without a good system of monetization, Facebook can only remove videos, not send big checks to the owners of stolen content. For the copyright holder, interfacing with a profitless system is just a pain in the ass with no upside.

I guess we’ll wait and see what comes out of Facebook, but perhaps people are going to start getting used to Facebook’s equivalent of the YouTube frowny face for blocked videos.

PS: I noted that Pakes’ response seems questionable on multiple levels, but I want to call out one big fat ridiculous claim, concerning why it pushes native uploaded videos much harder than YouTube videos:

With regard to the reach of video posts, the goal of Facebook?s News Feed is to show the right content to the right people at the right time. If you?re the type of person who likes to watch videos, you should be seeing more videos in your News Feed. If you tend to skip over videos, you will likely see less of them. Over years of developing and tuning News Feed, we know that clicking on a link to play video is not a great user experience, so people tend to interact slightly less with non-native video, and the posts get less engagement. Native video posts with auto-play tend to see better engagement, more watch time and higher view counts. It?s a nuanced but important point: native videos often do better than video links, but this is because people tend to prefer watching native videos over clicking on a link and waiting for something to load.

I find this difficult to believe. First, anyone who has used the Facebook video player and the YouTube video player knows that Facebook’s video player is terrible. The quality is terrible and the whole experience is annoying. For whatever reason, YouTube’s video player just tends to work better than nearly every other alternative (though in some cases Vimeo is nice too). Facebook’s just feels clunky. And it’s a bit ridiculous to argue that “clicking on a link to play video is not a great user experience.” No one seems to have a problem with it elsewhere. And I see plenty of complaints about Facebook’s annoying “autoplay” on videos, which would distort this data anyway, since Facebook counts “views” after 3 seconds.

Filed Under: censorship, contentid, copyright, hank green, takedowns
Companies: facebook, youtube