When NBC asked YouTube to yank off the SNL/Lazy Sunday video, many writers and analysts criticized NBC, arguing that such viral marketing was priceless. Of course, upon getting a letter from NBC’s lawyers, YouTube pulled an un-Napsteresque and obliged. In fact, according to Julie Supan, senior director of marketing at YouTube, the company tried to head off the earlier conflict, approaching NBC in late December about a possible partnership–but didn’t hear back until NBC’s legal warning arrived in February.
Today, it was announced that NBC will have its own channel on YouTube, marking the first time that the popular video sharing company is partnering up with an established network.
If you haven’t noticed, this is part of YouTube’s ongoing efforts to clean up their site, in the figurative sense of the word, by signing up more Directors and legit filmmakers who own the content. This reduces the amount of copyright violations and allows YouTube to funnel traffic to areas of the site that hosts “monetizable content.”
This past week, YouTube began to promote Director Videos a lot more, with a prominent right-hand side panel displaying videos from Directors as well as a box in the center of the main page. This makes sense to YouTube, it had a lot of traffic but advertisers would not want to advertise along content of dubious copyright nature.
This changed things, slowly but surely, and today’s announcement of the deal with NBC is a major coup for the company.
What’s interesting to note is that it could be argued that because NBC acted so strongly, it forced YouTube into developing an NBC channel, in other words, had NBC not said anything, it would not have had the leverage to ask for a specific channel. Of course, it could also be argued that YouTube wants to develop channels for all networks, creating a sort of alternative to those same networks’ websites, but giving them much more reach than they would get otherwise.
Also, the fact of the matter is that without YouTube, NBC never managed to stoke as much excitement for all of their failed attempts to spawn sequels to Lazy Sunday. So, perhaps, just perhaps, it was not their initial tough stand but rather, their missed attempts without YouTube to develop follow ups to Lazy Sunday that made this deal a no-brainer.
Incidentally, this begs the question, will ABC, FOX, CBS and company be next in signing up for this kind of arrangement? Of course FOX might be more prone doing something like this on MySpace… we shall see
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