Brian Stelter via The New York Times; Payoff Over a Web Sensation Is Elusive:
"[Susan Boyle] has already won a popularity contest on YouTube, where videos of her performances in April have been viewed an astounding 220 million times.
But until now, her runaway Web success has made little money for the program’s producers or distributors.
FremantleMedia Enterprises, a production company that owns the international digital rights to the talent show, hastily uploaded video clips to YouTube in the wake of Ms. Boyle’s debut, but the clips do not appear to be generating any advertising revenue for the company. The most popular videos of Ms. Boyle were not the official versions but rather copies of the TV show posted by individual users.
The case reflects the inability of big media companies to maximize profit from supersize Internet audiences that seem to come from nowhere. In essence, the complexities of TV production are curbing the Web possibilities. “Britain’s Got Talent” is produced jointly by three companies and distributed in Britain by a fourth, ITV, making it difficult to ascertain which of the companies can claim a video as its own...
YouTube, a unit of Google, has been keen to make money from its hulking library of online video by signing contracts with copyright owners and sharing the revenue from ads it sells before, during, after and alongside the videos. Major media companies have shown varying degrees of interest in these deals, in part because they are reticent to split much money with Google...
The broadcaster and producers allowed the copies to stay online because they created buzz for the program. The clips have received more than a half-million user comments.
The view counts continued to grow as people awaited Ms. Boyle’s next performance. Visible Measures, a company that tracks online video placements, said Ms. Boyle was responsible for the fastest-growing viral video in the roughly five-year history of Web video."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/business/media/25youtube.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&hpw=&adxnnlx=1243267357-yx358QnSV0PSvbz5bZMDwA
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