IPUrbia

GigaOM had a followup on the ongoing YouTube(Google)/Viacom legal wrangling. Viacom’s ongoing billion dollar lawsuit against Google is based on the premise that any financial success of YouTube is primarily off of illegal use of copyrighted clips, especially Viacom’s popular shows “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report”.

Viacom’s “hot” videos accounted, not for the bulk of YouTube’s usage as claimed, but for a meager 2%. Or, as one commentator posted,

Liz Gaines puts it best when she says, “So maybe YouTube really is about the long tail, the little guy, and the lonely girl.”

However, as I implied in a recent post on the matter, total usage is not the most relevant statistic. The danger of Viacom allowing their content to be hosted on YouTube is not that YouTube will profit from Viacom’s content, but that users, once they’ve watched their daily Colbert Report, will get drawn into the rest of YouTube’s content–content that MTV and Comedy Central content is especially vulnerable to. I have a hunch that, while people stay to watch user created content, they are often initially drawn to YouTube by the illicitly hosted commercial content.