A few days ago, Facebook proudly announced that they'd acheieved eight billion video views a day
That's really impressive, until you learn that in the first quarter of 2015,
725 of the thousand most viewed videos on Facebook were stolen, amassing a total of 17 billion views.
Sites and content aggregators steal videos from YouTube to go viral on Facebook.
These videos go viral because Facebook is cheating.
The rig their algorithm so that videos uploaded to their player are preferred to YouTube links
Because users should be kept as long as possible on the site, so Facebook can show them as many ads as possible.
This is, after all, their business model.
But it also cheats when it comes to views
A view is counted after three seconds, even if the video is muted
Which means that because of auto-play, if you scroll through your timeline slowly enough, you count as a viewer.
That means engagement is terrible
Compared to YouTube views, Facebook views plummet after a few seconds, because most views are not real
But large numbers are impressive, so Facebook keeps pretending
While this forced virality is weird, the real problem is the so-called "Freebooting", the stealing of videos
Since Facebook prefers its own player, stolen videos reach way more people than the original.
Lately this has happened to us more and more often
The most recent example amassed 3.2 million views and 140 thousand shares in two days,
While our own post reached just 100 thousand people and got shared 1000 times.
Other creators are hit even harder.
Smartereveryday's videos get stolen constantly, getting viewed up to 17 million times
But even this is dwarfed by examples like Tyrese Gibson, a singer who steals viral videos like this one, with 86 million views on his Facebook page.
He adds a link to buy his music too.
He's not alone in this,
A whole group of people have built their online presence around stealin other peoples' work
This is really bad for independent creators.
Contrary to popular belief
Stolen content gives creators close to no exposure at all
Only the thief and Facebook profit from this.
Quality content takes a lot of creativity, time, and love.
In our case, a single video literally takes hundreds of hours to make
Even we, with more than a million subscribers, are dependent on the ads and exposure.
Without ads, and the support of our generous Patreons, we could not make videos.
For a small creator, a viral video can mean the difference between a career and a hobby
On YouTube this kind of theft is not a problem because they have major safeguards that protect content from being stolen,
Although the content ID system is far from perfect, especially for film critics and gamers.
Facebook, on the other hand, pretends everything is fine and constantly announces one milestone after the other.
But things are not fine. Let's look at the process of claming your copyright on Facebook in the last year:
1. Get an email or tweet from a fan that gives you a direct link to your video.
It's not possible to search for your videos on Facebook yourself, you depend on luck to find your stolen videos.
2. Search for "Facebook copyright infringement" on Google, because it's actually faster this way
3. Fill out an annoyingly long contact form.
4. Watch the views on your stolen videos rise.
5. Facebook finally pulls the video
Conveniently, the video has already gained 99% of all the views it will ever get
The thief doesn't have to fear any negative consequences at all.
This is what successful creators have to deal with constantly,
and on top of losing out in terms of exposure and money, it just feels like violation to be treated like that.
In a recent statement, Facebook announced that they want to change
But it's hard to take them seriously when it still takes days for a stolen viral video to be taken down
and Facebook does not share the profits made from it.
At this point, Facebook is not a partner creators look forward to working with.
They've built their video empire on stolen content and disregard for original content creators.
This is absolutely unnacceptable for a corporation worth billions of dollars.
Facebook is already testing various monetization models that will give uploaders a cut of the ad revenue
Which, with the current state of play, is troubling.
RIght now this is just being tested with big media companies, but as creators, we don't feel like we're being asked or taken into consideration by the giant that is Facebook.
What can you, as a viewer, do to help here?
If you spot stolen content of FB, make a comment linking to the original content.
Alert the original creator, because only they can file a copyright report
Share this video or the one done by Smartereveryday
We all want the same thing, the free internet that is based for creativity, community and great stuff
We sincerely hope that Facebook will some become a parter, instead an obstacle to this goal
For more indepth information, we recommend this article by Hank Green
And if you want to support us in our quest to survive in the world of online videos. Or make more videos.
You can do so on Patreon.com