Posted by Ann Bernard

Oddly enough this isn’t my venting session, but one brought to you by Brian Devine from New Media Strategies.

Brian’s annoyance is rooted in the counter intuitiviness of people choosing to disable embedding on their YouTube videos…as he goes on to say, here are two major problems with that:

“There are two major problems with a band disabling the embedding of its official content.  The first is that you are directly disrupting organic online word of mouth promotion of your content – this is contrary to the best practice of making your not for profit material, like YouTube videos, as easy to be shared as possible in order to maximize your reach.  

Secondly, disabling the embedding of official content you are encouraging the spread of unofficial content.  Locking down the videos on YouTube will ultimately not have the effect of forcing consumers to go to the official YouTube Channel – people online will find other avenues to embed and share the content in other places and ways.  This will cause disabling embedding to only be a short-term snag to those looking for the content that will really only be at the expense of the artist who didn’t need to disable it in the first place.” 

Brian ended venting with: “My only hope that this outdated thinking is the result of management, labels, etc. and not the band themselves. “

Here are two examples that Brian noticed and mentioned: Glasvegas video for Please Come Back Home and Morrissey video for Alma Matters

Until Brian mentioned this…it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would choose to disable embedding capabilities for their videos.  After all, two factors that make a video potentially viral: Good content and the ability to share the video.

Andrew Parker author of blog The Gong Show wrote a blog post on this topic almost two years ago to the date and these are his thoughts/opinions on why someone would disable embeds on YouTube: 

"YouTube must be paying a rev share for this content. Content owners likely don’t want their videos to be played if they are not paid for the play, and YouTube can only do a rev share on videos played on their own site (until they develop ads embedded in the video). So, disabling embedding is a natural conclusion from these circumstances. This is greedy. 

Another reason why content owners might want to disable embeds is they want to control the messaging around their video. Content owners like Domino Records want to stop users from presenting their videos along side offensive, insulting, or otherwise unacceptable material. This is less greedy, but still lame. 

YouTube is turning off the feature that allowed them to become the 800 pound gorilla in online video. It was MySpace and blogosphere embeds that let YouTube rocket past previously established competitors like Veoh. YouTube has reached a critical mass, so I don’t think disabling embedding for a limited number of videos will effect their growth at this point. But, it’s pretty odd that YouTube would allow owners to disable the feature (more so than any other feature) that defines YouTube."

Bottom line question that can’t quite be answered is: “Why would someone limit the ability for their content to reach a wider audience?” Any thoughts?

Filed in venting, youtube

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