Mark Cuban thinks the Academy shouldn’t have issued a cease-and-desist order to YouTube to pull down clips of the Oscars, but not for the reason you might think. After all, Cuban doesn’t believe media companies should allow YouTube to “become the de facto manager” of their brands by aggregating eyeballs around their content. But he has a unique solution for the Academy: get a bunch of interns and edit 10-second clips of the Oscars that end with a graphic that plugs Oscar.com for full video. Then upload them, en masse, to YouTube. “I wouldn’t post this video one time,” Cuban writes. “I would post this video 100 times. And I would do the same thing for EVERY moment and segment in the Oscars. The reality is that YouTube viewers will grow tired of scanning through every video and just click over to Oscars.com.” He’s probably right, but of course, this would be all-out war with YouTube. And perhaps frustration isn’t the best way to motivate users to visit your site, but does it matter if they weren’t going to visit your site in the first place?
Adds Echy in comments: “If as you say the viewer wasn’t going to visit the site of the content owner then it’s okay to let YouTube keep the content for free? You’re out of your mind. Don’t get me wrong. I could care less about the Oscars, YouTube and most of the video available on the internet. But this idea that letting someone else display content that belongs to someone else is wrong. It won’t generate more viewers for the content provider (read paid ad views) because the viewer never has to visit the content generators site. They just keep going back to YouTube.”
Adds Safran: “In this model, how many people do you suppose would watch the clip, get fooled and then think, ‘Hey, good for them! I’m gonna go to Oscars.com now.’ Alienating and tricking your biggest fans is a lousy way to drum up traffic.”