News
News Categories

How ‘freebooting’ on Facebook is costing YouTubers tens of millions of pageviews

By Alvin Soon - on 13 Jul 2015, 11:30am

How ‘freebooting’ on Facebook is costing YouTubers tens of millions of pageviews

 

I learned a new word today: it’s ‘freebooting’, and it’s costing honest YouTubers tens of millions of pageviews, and a whole lot of cash.

For example, SmarterEveryDay is a YouTube channel created and hosted by Destin Sandlin, an engineer from the US. Sandlin does this part-time, but his channel has already racked up an impressive 2.8 million subscribers. Late last year, he made a video, called ‘Tattooing Close Up (in Slow Motion)’, which received more than 20 million views in nine months.

Unfortunately, Sandlin got ripped off. 18 million of those views didn’t go to him. Instead, after he published his video on YouTube, a Facebook page called Zoo downloaded his video from YouTube, edited it to remove anything pointing back to SmarterEveryDay, and uploaded it on Facebook’s native video player. It got more than 18 million views in the first two days for Zoo, and nothing for Sandlin.

This is what ‘freebooting’ is, and it’s a serious problem for YouTubers who rely on their popularity and YouTube ads to support their shows. Sandlin even made a SmartEveryDay video explaining the piracy problem:

Read more about Facebook’s ‘freebooting’ piracy problem on Slate. In the meantime, I’m going to remember to watch my favourite YouTubers on YouTube...even if those ads are pretty annoying.

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.