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My guess it's that they do it to discover what "hidden gems" actually have potential, and that they may not stay free.
These are movies nobody is lining up to syndicate, for a company desperate for cash. Why not dump them on YouTube and get a bit of ad revenue? It’s low effort relative to the income it generates. Even if it’s unlikely to make much money.
The why not is because it potentially devalues the prestige of the individual work’s IP, and the brand in general. This is short-term optimization, par for the course with the new Disovery-owned Warner Bros.
These are movies nobody is lining up to syndicate, for a company desperate for cash. Why not dump them on YouTube and get a bit of ad revenue? It’s low effort relative to the income it generates. Even if it’s unlikely to make much money.
The why not is because it potentially devalues the prestige of the individual work’s IP, and the brand in general. This is short-term optimization, par for the course with the new Disovery-owned Warner Bros.
I assume they get "monetization" from Youtube and they don't need to worry about hosting or discovery. Probably better than doing nothing with these films.
The only 2 companies that made money during the “streaming wars” were Netflix, which had the infrastructure in place already and didn’t need to build anything from scratch, and Sony, which decided not to build any streaming service and just license all its content out. Seems WBD is following the lead of a winner. * https://www.yahoo.com/tech/sony-succeeded-becoming-powerful-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I'm also a little surprised no one has yet (AFAIK) done the "viral indie release to Youtube" path. I feel like it's sitting there waiting to be exploited." There's a lot of "indies releasing things to YouTube directly". However, they're limited both by the algorithm and by the amount of money they can generate by that, so you get a fairly restricted set of genres that this can work with, like sketch comedy or (perha…
Got some recommendations?
It's been ages since I've seen "Oh God" or "Hot to Trot". Not great movies, not genre or culture defining, but fine. These are movies I'd watch if they were on.
I hope they do more. And I hope other distributors follow suit. Basically, I want Critters 1-3.
1. Clip a movie scene and crop it for vertical aspect ratio (maybe some AI is used here to choose the focus point of the scene)
2. Add royalty-free background music and possibly other tweaks like mirroring the video
3. Title it something generic that doesn’t acknowledge it’s a movie/show, like “College dropout beats Harvard Law grads to the job” for the scene from Suits (Note: for shorts, the title doesn’t matter if it’s algorithmically chosen to play next… in fact at this point the more relevant title is the optional link to a different short… the real title is barely visible)
4. Do not mention the name of the movie/show in the title or description
There are hundreds of accounts producing these shorts on an industrial scale. It’s easy to see how the automation works and also why it’s successful. It’s clickbait (people want to comment or ask for the title, or correct the title to mention it’s actually from a movie); it’s addicting (it funnels people into watching more clips from the same movie… funny how YouTube knows to do that but not that it’s copyrighted, btw); it’s self-optimizing (if the algorithm doesn’t surface the next short, people go looking for it specifically); and of course, it’s automatable (everything from curation to editing can be automated, and just a sprinkle of AI is apparently enough to obfuscate the automation).
What’s fascinating is that YouTube hasn’t stopped this. The shorts algorithm can obviously detect the similarity between clips from a movie, but the copyright/spam detection algorithm can’t detect the same.