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Should I be annoyed by other accounts embedding my videos?
I’m really keen to get some objective viewpoints on this one as I am quick to anger when this happens, and I’m not sure if I’m right to be annoyed!
I run a moderately successful YouTube channel around football (soccer). I produce short edits for Twitter, TikTok, FB and Insta to promote that channel and while conversion to YT is a challenge, the system works pretty well. But every now and then one of my short videos will hit big and a few aggregation accounts will either rip or embed my video on their accounts.
On Twitter the embeds allow them to present the video much as it would look if they uploaded it, save for the mention of my channel underneath the video. I know from experience that the attribution down there has little to no effect on awareness of my channel and YouTube traffic is not impacted. They are not converting users to me, something that’s hard to do even in my own account. If they were quote Tweeting this wouldn’t be an issue, and the very fact that they are not quote Tweeting is a clue to their motivations IMO.
But while I complain about it I’m often told I’m being petty and I should accept the publicity. From my perspective I spend 60-70 hours a week shooting and editing this content, while aggregation accounts are doing nothing more than stealing it in a ‘legal’ manner
So I guess what I’m asking is, does anyone else feel this way? Or do you think I’m missing something here? Should I be more liberal about people ripping or embedding my short videos?
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1 Reply
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I think a more relevant question is “What can you do about it?” Thinking of it as “publicity” may just be a way to cope because you don’t have any good alternatives actually. You could try watermarking your content – but that would probably just annoy your actual viewers. If you can copyright claim the videos on twitter that would probably be a good thing. You could block the big aggregators, but they would still be able to download and reupload your videos.
Bottom line, it’s not clear to me that you have a good way to stop them from doing that (if you do, please share). Without a way to stop them you might as well just hope they give you exposure somehow that you can’t perceive because what else are you going to do?
One other possible thing you could do is just repost their videos the same way they repost yours. You could still create original content, just every X days, or whenever they have a good post, repost theirs too. Your audience will presumably enjoy it and you can get a little something back from them.
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Watermark + DMCA if you think their re-upload is monetized.
If you are big enough, it’s almost certain to happen and the more there is the less you can realistically do something against it. Create your own clips channel and re-upload yourself before they do.
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I literally only started watching Theo Von, Joe Rogan & the Bad Friends podcast because of videos being ripped & reposted on socials. It leads to more people seeing your videos and after someone has seen 2-3 videos on other accounts they might search for the creator (you). That’s how it went for me with those names I mentioned, but if you’re not in your videos, no voice or anything like that then there’s nothing identifiably you, for people to remember. Maybe the focus should be on making your content more recognisable so it can be ripped and people will still know it’s yours.
I do understand your frustration tho, I used to make meme videos and I did over a billion views in 8 months but instead of being happy about that I was just pissed off with social chain and ladbible using my content across many of their pages, often getting more views than I was with no credit and they’d put their own watermarks on it and everything. I massively regret wasting time arguing with those guys tho and I was making memes which used things like movie clips so it’s not like I owned the content even tho my ideas were original.
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You don’t own the content you upload to the various platforms so there is no recourse if those sites have a remix function.
There is an aggregator site that rips our stuff at work. We watermark, no one has ever said boo about it. At least they think your stuff is worth stealing? We haven’t had ours ripped for a while, so that’s one way I know our quality isn’t where it should be. Hell, we had a scammer try to use our own video and try and scam us once. Weird experience watching a video I took with a heavily accented voice talk about the video.
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I believe if you get Twitter blue you can disable the downloading of your videos, I don’t know about embedding. Like others have said, include a watermark if you know it’s going on Twitter.
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