Facebook’s Piracy Problem • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook’s Piracy Problem

#71

Post by austenallred » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 10:37 PM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #67

austenallred wrote: post #37

This is absolutely rampant in the blackhat marketing world, (where I used to dabble, but still stay up on mostly out of curiosity). The model goes like this: Watch a few different pages and try to identify something that's bubbling up - that can be different viral facebook pages, reddit, whatever... there are a few different ways, but basically you constantly ping and scrape and try to identify stuff that's going vir…

Interesting. But after scraping the viral content, how do they get people to go to their page instead of the original? Does this work in tandem with gaming Google, so that searches for the viral keywords will get results with the blackhats on the first page?

They share the viral content on their Facebook pages, which spreads from there, and people like their Facebook pages.

The most spammy ones use clickjacking; basically they throw up something that covers the page with an ad (or a "like us on facebook" prompt), and use some JS to turn a click anywhere on the site into a facebook like. That's playing with fire though, as most of those pages get flagged and shut down.

They do get a little bit of traffic from Google because their social reach is extreme (one of the bigger things Google looks for now) but it's around 85% pure Facebook traffic

Re: Facebook’s Piracy Problem

#72

Post by scott_s » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 10:37 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #40

scott_s wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not directly at the moment, but they could do something similar to what the people who are ripping them off are doing: create a FB page for exposure, and hope that exposure turns into views on their YouTube channel.

But why should I go watch the video on YouTube when I just watched it on Facebook? Even better, the Facebook video doesn't have ads.

You probably won't. But you may check out other videos, or just remember the name and look later. It's not a great solution, but if I had content on YouTube and depending on the advertising from it, I would probably do this.

Re: Facebook’s Piracy Problem

#73

Post by joeyaiello » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 10:38 PM UTC

ritchiea wrote: post #44

dimino wrote: post #17

Why can't YouTube users just send a DMCA takedown notice to Facebook? If a video makes someone a decent amount of money, then just sue for damages as well. I'm not sure I understand what the problem is.

They probably don't have anyone on staff whose responsibility is to do that but it seems it would be in their best interest to create a department that defends their top contributors with DMCA takedown notices.

If that's true, it feels like willful negligence. They have a video platform that has access to a billion people. These are views in the tens of millions.

There's companies with order of magnitudes less traffic who have people fielding DMCA requests full-time. If FB doesn't, that's completely unacceptable, full stop.

Re: Facebook’s Piracy Problem

#74

Post by austenallred » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 10:40 PM UTC

littletimmy wrote: post #70

austenallred wrote: post #37

This is absolutely rampant in the blackhat marketing world, (where I used to dabble, but still stay up on mostly out of curiosity). The model goes like this: Watch a few different pages and try to identify something that's bubbling up - that can be different viral facebook pages, reddit, whatever... there are a few different ways, but basically you constantly ping and scrape and try to identify stuff that's going vir…

$60000/month off wordpress ads? That sounds unreasonably high. Why hasn't the market cleared off this profit by now?

Like I said, he's a really good marketer. The type that has been gaming Google since the beginning, but has since moved on to easier targets. That's not average; he pulls in around 6-18 million visitors/month (the variance is because viral traffic isn't exactly reliable) which is very much non-trivial. His sites climb into the top 500-1000 of Alexa rankings from time to time.

Screenshot of his Google Analytics: http://imgur.com/Edfo3cm

Re: Facebook’s Piracy Problem

#75

Post by bsder » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 10:42 PM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #53

bsder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why should I go watch the video on YouTube when I just watched it on Facebook? Even better, the Facebook video doesn't have ads.

The classic pirate answer is that after you torrent an album to try it out, you go buy a copy to support the artist. So after you watch the Facebook video, you'd go watch it again on YouTube to support the creator.

And we all know how well that worked for the music industry.

Re: Facebook’s Piracy Problem

#76

Post by davidcgl » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 10:42 PM UTC

scrame wrote: post #59

Wow, Facebook is a bunch of assholes, screwing people over for a quick buck. Who would have thought...

Someone stole the video and reposted it on Facebook. Facebook didn't do this.

Re: Facebook’s Piracy Problem

#77

Post by rythie » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 10:46 PM UTC

This seems pretty common in British newspapers, even outside facebook. Videos often appear on newspaper's own sites instead of embedding the YouTube video. For example this from the Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/apr/29/ed-mil...). Others are similar and often even have their own pre-rolls.

Channel4 has whole TV programme, Rude Tube (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rude_Tube), devoted to internet clips, which are all from YouTube AFAIK. I wonder if the creators get any money from that.

Re: Facebook’s Piracy Problem

#78

Post by gknoy » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 10:48 PM UTC

baddox wrote: post #69

talon88 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Perhaps financial renumeration, while fair, isn't entirely necessary" Is it that in your world, eating and paying the rent isn't necessary either? 'Many' creative people sounds like some programmers, which is somewhat small subset of all creatives. I'd be surprised if the majority of creative people — artists, writers, actors, and more — would happily go about saying that financial renumeration doesn't matter to the…

> Is it that in your world, eating and paying the rent isn't necessary either? Of course it is, and thus figuring out an occupation or business model that allows you to eat and pay rent is important.

While that sounds great, I suspect that there are many people with the skill and interest to be professional artists who, if they were spending their days writing code or welding or $JOB, would be uninterested / unable to dedicate resources (time, money) towards Creating Things in the degree that they can when creating such things is their full-time job.

tl;dr: There should be a way for creative people to make Creating Art the occupation that pays them money for rent/food/etc.

Re: Facebook’s Piracy Problem

#79

Post by qq66 » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 10:49 PM UTC

larrys wrote: post #9

kevando wrote: post #6

Didn't youtube start the same way?

Sure but from my understanding of the article youtube isn't really the aggrieved party it's the creators that are.

YouTube is an aggrieved party since they are losing money too, but there's far more popular sympathy for the individual creators.

Re: Facebook’s Piracy Problem

#80

Post by airza » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 10:51 PM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #52

A radical idea: Maybe our model of intellectual property is wrong, or outdated. When IP was tied to a physical object, it made some sense to restrict and explicitly license each reproducer. Now we have incredible machines that can reproduce intellectual property almost infinitely, distribute it anywhere on Earth, and find it almost anywhere on Earth. Wow! Maybe we should embrace that innovation, and find a model that…

It's a little tone-deaf to suggest that people who don't make six figures in their day job are lining up to have their content stolen because our industry inadvertently built extremely good ways of doing so.