Web Traffic is what everyone fights for and there is a price for it
If you are following the headlines of internet news, you may have come accross an article about the legal case opposing YouTube/Google and Viacom whereas Viacom is seeking at least 1 Billion Dollars from Google/Youtube for having built their business based on copyright infringements.
What is the point here? YouTube is a platform allowing most anyone to upload and to stream video content. Many users copy or tweak copyright protected clips or exctracts. The popularity of YouTube, it's extremely high rankings and publishing power and consequently it's value are function of the traffic generated by visitors who watch and embed video content from YouTube.
The problem is that copyright violating contents seems to attract loads of visitors (video clips, movie excerpts, tweaked extracts and clips) and that some of these contents may have a negative impact commercially (music clips for example).
The success of YouTube is built on content loaded by its users and the fact that such content attracts loads of visitors. YouTube provides the platform, the users and visitors do the rest, or in other terms: YouTube does not pay for content nor for traffic.
Free Traffic and Free Content is the formula to success and the same is true for all social networks as well such as MySpace, FaceBook and others.
By enforcing copyright protection, free traffic will not be as free anymore as planned by the siteowners. If platform owners can be held responsible for the contents loaded by their users, then they either will have to spend money on increased controls and/or spend money on copyrights and add such cost to their operating costs. Translate this cost into a price per view or a price per visitor and you know the cost for content and traffic.
Finally, what is the value of traffic?
Traffic is priceless! If Viacom and others get satisfaction and if copyrights and trademarks are enforced online, then the value of traffic will heavily increase.
On the other hand, and that's the good news for all publishers: the value of your original content will proportionally increase as well.
May be we will then see a completely new movement online, where all the hordes of people attracted by free social networks will notice, that their content has a commercial value the platform owners should pay for. And maybe one day there will be an end put to hijacking of content and traffic for the purpose of adding value to shares which the site owners sell to the financial market places, commercializing thus the creation of others in their own name and for their own profit.
Bottom line: the value of free traffic and free content corresponds to the capitalization of these concerned networks on the stock exchange and that's over a trillion of dollars!
Believe it or not, traffic is a hotter commodity than oil with much steeper price hikes now and in the future.
Greek Coffee Time
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