YouTube viral videos are downloaded and reuploaded on Facebook on a daily basis, content creators are mad

Jul 9, 2015 10:02 GMT  ·  By

We all suspected it in one form or another, but not as dastardly as YouTube star Destin Sandlin explained it in one of his videos.

Mr. Sandlin is the owner of the SmarterEveryDay YouTube channel, and during the past year he has been battling individuals and sometimes big media companies that download his YouTube videos and reupload them to Facebook, as Slate reports.

The phenomenon which is known as "Facebook Freeboting" is in his own words encouraged by Facebook, which ends up racking up advertising money from the many viral YouTube videos reuploaded to its network every day.

Viral videos get ripped off YouTube daily, and then reuploaded to Facebook

Mr. Sandlin details the case of his "TATTOOING Close Up (in Slow Motion)" video which a few days after it was posted on his YouTube channel got reuploaded on Facebook by none other than one of Europe's biggest media groups, the German-based Bauer Media Group.

Being informed by a friend of this issue, Mr. Sandlin, which makes a living from posting educational YouTube videos, contacted Facebook and used their copyright protection tools to have it taken down.

While this might seem the normal avenue of fixing the problem, it wasn't. Taking the video down took a while, and when this happened, a Bauer employee reuploaded the video again.

In the end, the Facebook video got over 18 million views, for which Facebook as a company earned large sums of money by displaying ads along with the video, money which will never reach Mr. Sandlin, the creator of the content.

Are you seeing a lawsuit between Google and Facebook in the near future? Cause we sure are!

Meanwhile, in 10 months of playback on YouTube, the same video got only 24 million views. This is because even if a YouTube video is posted on Facebook using the classic embedding mechanism, and the same video is then uploaded on Facebook using their own player, the version of the video hosted on Facebook, the one with no YouTube ads from which the content creator can benefit, gets a higher priority in a user's timeline feed.

This whole shady affair comes to explain why Facebook's video service has been growing so rapidly in the past year, recently reporting on a market study which placed Facebook closely behind YouTube regarding video market share.

Obviously, Facebook is not at fault for what its users do, but it could improve its copyright protection tools to better serve and address this issue. But why would the company do that when it's making a killing in advertising?

Here's Mr. Sandlin explaining the issue himself: