YouTube warns users over product placement
YouTube has written to several users warning them they are not allowed to include commercial messages in their supposedly amateur videos. The warning appears to be motivated by concerns that companies might be paying video makers for inclusion rather than paying YouTube itself for advertising.
The company is complaining about product placement deals, in which a video maker accepts cash in return for including a mention or display of a particular product in their clip. According to YouTube, this makes the clips into a commercial video, which can only be uploaded with prior permission.
MediaWeek notes one example of a producer of a series of clips spoofing NASCAR TV coverage who included on-screen plugs for the Hardee’s restaurant chain, without asking YouTube first.
The site doesn’t appear to enforce the rule consistently: some producers say they’ve been allowed to use product placement as long as they also sell overlaid advertising through YouTube, while others say their product placement clips have been left online, but they’ve not had the type of promotion they’d have expected from the site.
YouTube’s argument that users shouldn’t be allowed to make cash from product placement while the site gets nothing but pays for the bandwidth seems pretty reasonable. The problem is that it’s extremely difficult to enforce practically.
Not only would you need human monitoring to spot product placement, but you’d then need an adjudication process to distinguish between genuine plugs and innocent cases where a poster simply happened to be using a branded product. Indeed, even when product placement was blatant, it would be virtually impossible to prove any cash had changed hands.
For the moment, then, it appears YouTube will have to stick to its current plan of putting pressure on the producers of the most popular content and getting across its message that people making money from product placement have a moral obligation to share the proceeds with the site.
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May 7th, 2009
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