Video Content for Affiliates
There’s interesting news for affiliates that a company called 10Speed Media is working towards developing a way for merchants to provide video content for their affiliates to use.
This basically involves streaming video from a remote server and placing it on your website. The whole video is a clickable affiliate link. You can see an example of this in action at Chriknudsen’s blog - chrisknudsen.biz
This is very interesting and a very positive development for our industry, however, you will notice that they are streaming that video from YouTube. I am wondering whether YouTube are going to get upset.
On chrisknudsen.biz, for example, the link that would usually point towards YouTube is actually pointing to the advertiser, insidesales.com
At first glance, this would seem to me that 10SpeedMedia (and by default their merchant insidesales.com and affiliate, chrisknudsen.biz) are using YouTube’s bandwidth without any benefit to YouTube, (unless of course they have some understanding or commercial agreement with YouTube).
YouTube’s terms of service states:
F. YouTube permits you to link to materials on the Website for personal, non-commercial purposes only. In addition, YouTube provides an “Embeddable Player” feature, which you may incorporate into your own personal, non-commercial websites for use in accessing the materials on the Website, provided that you include a prominent link back to the YouTube website on the pages containing the Embeddable Player. YouTube reserves the right to discontinue any aspect of the YouTube Website at any time.
It would seem at first glance that the way in which the video is being used in the above example could perhaps be breaking both the provision regarding commercial use and the requirement of a linkback.
The most obvious way for 10 Speed Media to remedy any conflict here would be for them or their merchants to host the video file on their own servers. This however can get very expensive, very quickly and may not be sustainable (which is probably why they have used YouTube in the first place).
Now, I am sure the people at 10 Speed Media are aware of these issues and working on a way to address them.
I hope they get around to a solution soon, because I for one am quite excited about the prospect of being able to put affiliate videos on my sites!
If 10 speed media are using youtube then they would have to be paying them but because youtube is constantly increasing it’s space and bandwidth it is a lot cheaper for youtube to increase then it is for 10 speed media to completely build the server from scratch.
February 10th, 2007 at 9:51 am