Success Online.IN Success Secrets For Your Online Venture

Some of you may not agree that this is a good way to earn more. But, Google uses it to their advantage… and so, I thought I’d share it with my readers…

If you’ve not been sleeping for the past year or so you’ve probably heard of Google’s Youtube acquisition for 1.7 Billion USD. Thats a lot of spare change.

Youtube is basically a video sharing and viewing community website, that was able to use a “hole” in the US legal system to their advantage. The US law says that site owners are not liable for the content that their community uploads and shares until an objection is raised by the Copyright owner and the site owners are contacted to take the content down. Until then they can enjoy all the free traffic that they generate with any (mostly a lot of) copyright infringing content without getting their hands dirty. It’s a neat little loophole in the US law system, and it is being used by plenty of video sites and many other Social Media (Web2.0)and UGC (User Generated Content) websites (like Flickr, Yousendit, Megaupload and many other Web2.0 sites) to get loads of traffic and generate loads of ad revenues with all this traffic.

So how does Google and other video sites benefit more when they are informed and asked to take down copyright violating content?

Well… imagine that they are getting a Click Through Rate of say 1.5% on their video playback pages. Then imagine them taking down only the main video – but leaving the Video title intact – and displaying a message within the flash player saying that “This video is no more available” or “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by xyz” [example].

So, what does the viewer do now? Well, he looks around the page quickly for other related content – and viola! What does he see? In some cases – as on foreign sites with Youtube embedded videos – he sees mostly other related Adsense ads that match the video’s content title description! And since he came looking for this video he is more than likely to click on these ads! The user does not see a page saying “broken link” etc, but is rather led on to more video content or clicks on relative ads.

The Click Through Rate for these “dead” pages are substantially very high, and I’m willing to bet that they go as high as 10% from 1.5%. (I run a video site, and had to take down some objectionable content – so I am talking from experience here). This means more money for Google when they take down infringing content but leave the pages intact with the video titles in place. Taking the videos down means MORE money in terms of clicks generated on these pages!! Perhaps you could use this for your (video) content site in some ways to boost your click through rates and Google Adsense revenues. It works for my video website

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full feed RSS. You can also subscribe by Email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.