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Youtube Pulls Chris Pirillo’s Advertising?

May 15, 2008

Today (5/16/2008), while watching Chris Pirillo record one of his CNN segments, someone in his chatroom mentioned ads and his Youtube videos.  So I decided to look around his Youtube channel and it was apparent to me that many of his latest videos had the advertisements removed from the lower left corner of each clip.

Why is this a big deal?  Well, Chris uses this lower portion of his screen area to promote his sponsors while streaming live from his home.  In addition, he records the clips (now pushing 1300) and pushes them out to Youtube where they are seen by many more thousands people than his live steam.

One of his videos has over 6 million views with others are in the hundreds of thousands!  That’s a lot of coverage for his sponsors on Youtube’s dime.  If this is indeed Youtube’s effort to enforce one of their policies, it may have a significant effect on Chris’ ability to sell advertising for his shows.

My guess is one of two thing have happened here:

  • Youtube whacked the ads for a policy/terms of use violation (see below) - this area of the video is also used by Youtube to display their advertising over your content.
  • It was an oversight on the person encoding and uploading Chris’ videos to Youtube?
I’m guessing Youtube is purposely removing ads from Chris’ videos.  Why?  If you look at any of the videos where his adverts have been removed, you’ll notice the chatroom, is still there.  If the missing ads were and error on Chris’ part (or his employees), I would venture to say both the chat and advert areas would be missing, not just one.
I quick look at the terms of service revealed this:

4. General Use of the Website—Permissions and Restrictions

  • use of the Website or its related services (such as the Embeddable Player), for the primary purpose of gaining advertising or subscription revenue;

    • YouTube hereby grants you permission to access and use the Website as set forth in these Terms of Service, provided that:

    D. You agree not to use the Website, including the YouTube Embeddable Player for any commercial use, without the prior written authorization of YouTube. Prohibited commercial uses include any of the following actions taken without YouTube’s express approval:

    The Youtube terms mention “written permission.”  Is this a simple matter of Chris obtaining permission or a matter of sharing revenue with Youtube in order to keep his ads in place?  Only two entities know for sure so the rest of us will have wait it out and see what happens.

    What do you think?  Let me know in the comments below:

    Gordon

    Written by Gordon Medley · Filed Under Internet | 4 Comments