Officially, YouTube frowns upon adult content. According to the site’s user agreement, “obscene” and “pornographic” material may not be submitted. However, with no prior approval process, adult content often makes it onto the site. Much like Craigslist.org, it’s up to the community to handle the police work. Once an inappropriate clip is found, YouTube removes it.
But that doesn’t stop adult website operators from plugging their product on YouTube because a clip will be played thousands of times before the site removes it.
The site streams 35 million videos per day and attracts an audience of 9 million users per month, according to Neilsen’s NetRatings, making it more popular than AOL, Google and Yahoo video services.
With that kind of audience, the free site is looking to cash in by converting traffic to advertising revenue.
While such a move will add more pressure to the site’s administrators to keep it free from adult content, it also puts more mainstream pressure on YouTube.
While YouTube aggressively protects copyright by taking down illegal clips of mainstream shows, it also benefits from the attention.
An SNL skit titled “Lazy Sunday” that featured two comedians rapping about their Sunday afternoon plans, helped boost site traffic by 85 percent. Another SNL skit, “The Chronic(what?)cles of Narnia,” which appeared on the site after it aired on television, received 5 million views before NBC demanded its removal. The television audience for the same clip was 6.6 million.
According to site co-founder Steve Chen, YouTube takes precautions to limit piracy by limiting the size of videos that can be uploaded, creating software that helps studios track and report unauthorized copies and improving tools that remove all copies of a particular video.
While YouTube has rejected the idea of being labeled “the next Napster,” Russell Frackman, the attorney who represented the recording industry in its lawsuits against file-sharing sites like Napster isn’t so sure that sites like YouTube are in the clear.
According to Frackman, the sites may not have business models built solely on infringement, but they do benefit from it.
Still, many studios see the site in much the same way that adult webmasters have —a great promotional tool.
”We look at sites like YouTube and, for that matter, a multitude of other online options as just that — new options that we look to embrace," Darcy Antonellis, Warner Bros. Entertainment senior vice president of worldwide anti-piracy, said. “We look to embrace it, but not at the expense of infringing copyright.”