Internet Marketing Toolbox

There’s a rash of sites being developed lately that WILL incur the wrath of the big “G”! And it won’t take long for it to come crashing down on you!

Basically, these sites are video blogs, using software to automatically “harvest” or aggregate videos from YouTube - and not only the videos, but the comments and everything!

So what’s wrong with that?

Well… there’s nothing wrong with it if you ONLY use the occasional YouTube video on your site or blog - in fact, they encourage you to do it.

But when the site is nothing else but YouTube videos and monetized by advertising (perhaps Adsense) then you are breaching their terms of use.

From Google themselves:

What kinds of commercial uses of the YouTube website are prohibited, and which aren’t?

We’ve recently updated our Terms of Use to clarify what kinds of uses of the website and the YouTube Embeddable Player are permitted. We don’t want to discourage you from putting the occasional YouTube video in your blog to comment on it or show your readers a video you like, even if you have general purpose ads somewhere on your blog.

We will, however, enforce our Terms of Use against, say, a website that does nothing more than aggregate a bunch of embedded YouTube videos and intentionally tries to generate ad revenue from them.

See the original here.

And these new sites, with this software that automatically builds and updates them based on YouTube videos… well if that isn’t “aggregating a bunch of embedded YouTube videos” then I don’t know what is.

Now the only reason most people do this would be to make money from the advertising displayed… so if you wanna get your Adsense account slammed shut and lose that income stream forever???? Then go right ahead and do it.

Me? I’m staying right away from that sort of nonsense!

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