YouTube’s “Mafia Shake Down”

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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According to CNNMoney, Google’s (GOOG) is only offering anti-piracy software to content owners who have a commercial deal with the huge video sharing site.

YouTube says that locating pirated material requires direct cooperation with the individual media companies, so perhaps it has a case. It can’t cooperate with companies that are not customers.

Sounds weak.

Companies like Viacom (VIA) liken the move by YouTube to blackmail. And, YouTube does not need to go any further to alienate media firms.

The prevailing wisdom is that media companies need YouTube to get promotion for their programs because YouTube’s audience is so large. But, a look at the most popular clips on YouTube does not turn up a lot of programming from "big media".  There is a clip called Gladys Hardy on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, but it would not appear to be anything that viewers would pay for.

If media companies need promotion for their programming, YouTube is hardly their only option, and it may not be their best.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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