How YouTube manages copyright and monetises content

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 09 December 2009 05:41

Business IT - Technology

When you upload a video to YouTube the audio and video content is checked by YouTube against a database of copyrighted material constantly updated by copyright owners who have specified whether they want to block content, allow it to be posted or to monetise that posting, and the technology has the potential to be greatly expanded to serve parent Google's global information management goals.


YouTube senior product manager, Dave King, the creator of YouTube Content ID explained how the system "scans over 100 years of video every day and tracks the rights associated with every piece of content on YouTube."

King said: "We have made a big investment in our content ID platform with the aim of providing an automated, scalable service that enables rights holders to make choice about whether content appears on YouTube.

"Given the scale of our operation we felt it was important to help rights holders find their content on our site, other than through manual search...Rights holders give us a copy of what they own. From that we generate a massively shrunk reference file that can be stored and looked up in a database. We do the same for every user upload and we compare that against the reference file.

"Every entry contains a usage policy. Right holders can choose to monetise [get a share of revenue from ads associated with their material], block it, or just track viewing... Every time anyone gives us new reference files we have to run these against everything that has ever been uploaded to YouTube, which means we are analysing about 100 years of video every day."

He added: "The vast majority of partners using the system are choosing to leave content on the site and monetise it, but when we flipped the switch [to activate Content ID, in October 2007] we had no idea how they would respond. Now the activity from this platform generates about one third of the monetisable views for the site."

King declined to say what percentage of uploaded content to YouTube found a hit in the reference database, but said that YouTube was running at about one billion views per day and was able to monetise about one billion per week, and: "As a matter of policy we only monetise those videos where we have a very clear idea of the copyright situation."

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