Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Who are you, NewsPoliticsNews?

Take a look at the "Most Viewed" section of youtube.com/news today - and you'll see that there's one story dominating the thumbnail-dom: the FedEx plane crash in Tokyo. While this probably won't surprise you, what you might find interesting is that 2 of the top 3 videos are uploaded by the same user - NewsPoliticsNews.



This plucky YouTuber has played the same game that so many other fair-use fanatics have played the past three years - uploading the most interesting bits of news to YouTube - but he/she/they(?) have been consistently hitting the tops of the charts.

Look at NewsPoliticsNews' channel - it's chalk full of news clips from TV that have racked up hundreds of thousands of views (though the top clip, of a screaming crowd of would-be models at "America's Top Model") does look like it could have been shot by our mystery uploader.



The success of TV rips on YouTube is not new. And we have a first-rate content ID system that allows original content owners to take down infringing material, or claim it as their own and run ads against it. Yet NewsPoliticsNews doesn't seem to be getting the attention of the networks, and is grabbing their audiences on YouTube with increasing effectiveness. CNN sure would have like to have picked up these extra 600K viewers.

So who are you, NewsPoliticsNews, and what is your story? Citizentube would welcome a post - annonymous or otherwise.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

looking through his/her twitter profile, its pretty obvious that the person that operates "NewsPoliticsNews" is homosexual (nothing wrong with that). Looking through YouTube, he/she also appears to be a leftist (again, nothing wrong).

However, what he/she is doing is illegal (its wrong). FoxNews/CNN/MSNBC and all the news networks own they footage they air. Eventually they come down on everyone on youtube who posts their clips. FoxNews and CNN have their own channels and they do post snippets of their programming. Hopefully NPN gets out before he.she is sued.

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