The Olympics Did It: YouTube Becomes SpamTube

Roger Hislop

A few mates and I were hanging out last night, and because none of us has satellite TV, we thought it would be cool to fire up the old Web browser and see a few of the highlights from the Beijing Olympics (free Tibet! Remember Tiananmen Square! Los uit on the Falun Gong! Right, that’s the whole of my Chinese audience taken out). The men’s 100m, the baton-dropping men’s relay debacle, maybe some of the weightlifting. But between the basking sharks of the IOC, the lumpen Beijing Games organisers and the trough-gorging global media, we economy-class passengers in the Third World get nothing but Internet video spam. It’s a whole new thing: YouTube spam –a crashing avalanche of it that will crush the world’s most popular video sharing service unless Google does something smart, post-haste.

If you do a YouTube search for “men’s 100m final beijing” you’ll get pages and pages of hits – all of which (without exception) are for video spam. Some are even helpfully labelled “(REAL)”.

The promised footage is just a set of video/still montages of the athletes, with clusters of links to videos of other popular events (“Women’s 200m”, “weight lifting accident”, “caber tossing gold medal”), or even unrelated headline news (“hurricane in Spain”). All of these, of course, are also not actual footage, but even more montages filled with links.

Clearly the Digital Media Piracy Police are in full fettle all over the Internet – the few actual links to unofficial video footage have already been taken down. And even if they’re still up, they’re lost in a swarm of video spam.

I must confess I’m a little baffled as to what the business model behind this spam is – there’s hordes of it, and all it seems to do is bounce you around in an endless chain of spam YouTube videos – unless there’s malware being pushed, I don’t see money or revenue-generating clicks happening, but one assumes the spammers are not going to all this effort for nothing. And how did they get clickable links into the actual video itself? Some of the more home-made spam vids are clearly intended to drive traffic to a website – they slideshow some pics of an event with some interesting factoids and backing music, and display a URL (not clickable – they’ve obviously not cracked the Alpha-male spammers ability to embed clickable links in videos).

And who is to blame (apart from the spammers themselves)? The IOC, and how they negotiate digital media rights. You can see the Olympics online in the US or the UK – but they’re using geolocation to prevent you being served video if you’re outside the territory. In many larger countries you can see the Web footage, free, because it’s ad-supported. Fine. Wonderful. Web 2.0, man! But if you live outside these countries, sorry for you. Obviously only the biggest players have the time and money to negotiate online video content deals, and no-one can be bothered to arrange Internet-based access for the rest of the world – least of all any of the local content portals.

So thanks to the Beijing Olympics, which has masterfully created an insatiable desire for video footage, and merged this with a media distribution business model that only talks to large players like NBC or the BBC. This has made pirated content on YouTube the only alternative for those without TV. Add the relentless and draconian measures by the large media companies to protect their investments and we have a massive content vacuum. Which spammers are always happy to fill.

Good luck sorting this one out, Google, because now that YouTube is becoming Spamedy Central, the punters will leave in droves.

* Realeconomik is a whole new word – like realpolitik, but for economics

PS I finally found some old footage from the men's weightlifting final at the 2004 Atlanta games. Good enough to rock out on and feel that Olympic spirit. Hell, it all looks the same anyway.

• 2008/08/25
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