Thanks for signing up!
Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you're on the go.
This is why YouTube users are revolting against Facebook
Freebooting, the term for videos that have been downloaded from YouTube and then uploaded to Facebook, has become a huge issue for the creative community in recent months.
Advertisement
Freebooting gained attention over the summer when Hank Green, the prominent YouTube creator and co-founder of the Vidcon convention, wrote about the problem on Medium.
Now, a new video from Kurzgesagt Projects, a Munich-based animation and design studio, breaks down the issue.
The video has resonated with a large number of people, and has been viewed more than 1.2 million times on YouTube since it was first uploaded two days ago.
It shows how freebooters are able to take millions of views away from content creators and how Facebook makes it difficult to report this practice.
Advertisement
Facebook declined to comment on Kurzgesagt's video.
Check out how freebooting works, and why it has so many people upset.
A July report from Ogilvy and Tubular Labs that found that 725 of the 1,000 most popular videos on Facebook during the first quarter of this year had been stolen from Facebook.
But the creators didn't actually get credit for them. That's because the videos were uploaded in Facebook's player, not in the original YouTube player from the person or group that created the video.
Videos uploaded in Facebook's player get more engagement on Facebook than YouTube videos. These native videos autoplay in your News Feed so you don't have to leave the site to watch them.
"Freebooting" is the term for when someone takes a video from another service, like YouTube, and then uploads it to Facebook.
Singer and actor Tyrese Gibson, radio stations, and some companies are among the prominent offenders, according to the video.
One recent freebooted video from Kurzgesagt Projects, for example, got 3.2 million views on Facebook. The studio's own YouTube version, on the other hand, only reached 108,000 people.
Facebook increases engagement — people stay on the site longer. And whoever freebooted the video increase their social following.
They not only miss out on revenue from their own ads that play in their videos, but they can't account for the number of times their video has been viewed.
"In the social space, your reach and your viewership is your value," Casey Neistat, a prominent filmmaker and artist with 1.5 million fans on YouTube, told Tech Insider in August. "Your value is in how great your reach is, and that’s true across all social platforms. It’s all quantifiable... So any time someone is taking views from your work, they’re getting value off of something that’s not theirs."
As the Kurzgesagt's narrator explains, this isn't as big of a problem on YouTube, because YouTube has a system that recognizes freebooted content.
"I feel like they’ve got my back," Neistat said of YouTube in August. "I feel like they want to be in the right... I feel like my [intellectual property] is being protected."
You can't even search for videos on Facebook, so it's hard for creators to find their freebooted videos. They have to resort to Googling or even crowd sourcing, as Neistat recently did, to find videos that have been stolen from them.
"The times that I’ve had to get content removed from Facebook it’s been incredibly complicated," Neistat told Tech Insider in August. "It’s a convoluted process with very little feedback."
Facebook has said it will start making it easier for creators to report abuse, but it's unclear how much progress the company has made. Meanwhile, creators are still very frustrated with the problem.
Kurzgesagt encourages people who see stolen videos on Facebook to get in touch with the creator of the original video, because only the creator can request that Facebook take that version down. People can do this by tagging the creator in the video comments of the freebooted video.
The studio also encourages people to share the video, and read the article from Hank Green to learn more.
Advertisement