I’m an early adopter Skype fan and still didn’t think eBay was wise to pay billions for them. I wasn’t an early adopter for the popular video site YouTube and when I first wrote about them here back in Februrary, I still hadn’t even registered. I have mixed emotions about the site to this day. They are sort of like eating chocolate. You know you probably should stay away, but damn it tastes so good.

With that said, anybody who pays at least $1.5 billion for YouTube in its current copyrape condition is even more unwise than eBay. At least Skype had a revenue model. What does YouTube have? Traffic, yes, lots and lots of traffic.

Via the NY Post:

Now YouTube’s “magic number” stands at more than $1.5 billion, according to a senior industry source. Potential suitors include Viacom, Disney, AOL, eBay, and News Corp., the parent company of The Post.

A YouTube spokesperson said the company is more interested in building “a long-term viable company. And we don’t comment on rumors and speculation.”

I like the company line. I hope that’s the case. It will be interesting to see if there is any substance to that long term.

And ok, the 1.5 billion is just a rumored price, but assuming that’s accurate, that’s too much money for a site that current looks too much like the original Napster. Once YouTube’s cupboards are much closer to being clean and legit and it starts turning a serious profit maybe these billion dollar guestimates can be taken seriously.

My own YouTube / Hmm experiment
Since February I registered for YouTube and even linked up a few videos here and there. I thought it would be interesting to see how many of these videos are still on YouTube and ponder whether or not they were violating a copyright. Disclaimer: I’m not an attorney and have no formal legal training. I’m just a layman with 20+ years of business experience, 12+ owning our own businesses.

I started with a site YouTube search and worked my way through the videos embedded or linked. The dates, post links, my non-lawyer assessment of the copyright and whether the videos are still up follow.

February 28, 2006: Microsoft Origami video. Copyright violation? Doesn’t seem Microsoft authorized, but don’t know. Still live.
March 18: Pill-popping Pac-Man parody. Probably legal. Still up.
April 13: Titanic 2 spoof. Probably legal. Still up.
April 16: Flintstones Winston cigarette ad. Possible violation, but neither Winston or Hanna Barbera will probably complain. Still up.
May 9: E3 2006 Spore game footage. Probably legal and promotional so who would complain? Still up.
May 12: Super Mario Galaxies footage. Promotional, probably legal. Still up.
July 10: Robot parking a beamer. Promotional, probably legal. Still up.
July 11: Hilarious old Atari Pole Position commercial. Violation. Still up.
July 11: Andrew Baron explaining his side of Rocketboomgate. Not sure, but it seems legal. Still up.
July 22: Microsoft pokes fun at themselves. Legal, promotional. Still up.
July 26: Multiple hidden and security camera videos. Don’t know on the legality here, but would guess OK. Still up.
Aug 9: My own very first uploaded YouTube video showing zombies being mowed down in the Xbox 360 game Dead Rising. Legal. Still up.
Aug 30: Simpsons voice actors on Conan O’Brien. Violation. Still up.
Sep 9: Livin’ on a Prayer acoustic cover. I doubt the rights were purchased to cover and publish this song on YouTube. Still up.

Summarizing the activity I learned that 8 of the 14 appear to be either legal, 3/14 are either clear copyright violations or strongly appear to be a violation (the Bon Jovi cover song video) and the remaining 3/14 are questionable. Even if we give YouTube the benefit of the doubt on those three questionable videos, what about the other 3/14 (21.42%)?

While I’d be among the first to acknowledge it’s very difficult to prevent copyright content being posted, it’s not as difficult to pay people to moderate and remove it once discovered. For YouTube to be worth more money the first thing they need to do is clamp down on the copyrighted content. It seems like their efforts so far have been toward cleaning out the really obvious stuff. That’s easy. They need to dig deeper which takes more manpower or use services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to sift through and make judgement calls on copyright like I just did. Hold over the questionable stuff for an inhouse legal staff to approve.

Expensive, you say? Not for a company rumored to be worth more than a billion dollars. I’ll be surprised if YouTube in its current condition sells for more than a billion dollars. Not shocked perhaps, but surprised. You?

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