A friend of mine pointed me to the story about Aleksey Vayner, a Yale Student that organized a huge lie about his resume (fake CEO of a fraudulent investment firm, member of a fraudulent charity, author of a book about the Holocaust that was copied from an existing one) to try to get a job at investment banking firm USB. As part of the job application, Aleksey put together a 7 minutes motivational video about himself titled “Impossible is Nothing” that portraits himself lifting weights, doing karate and dancing and is full of lame comments like “if you are going to work, work. If you are going to train, train. If you are going to dance, then dance but do it with passion”. What a freak (and a liar) you might think and so did someone else at USB HR department since the story got out and the video ended up in YouTube. Click here to find out more information about this story.
This is where the second part of the headline of this post comes in. The video is no longer in YouTube due to copyright infringement, apparently, Aleksey himself sent a letter to YouTube asking to remove it and, scare as they might be about law suits (and with an announcement about a $1,6BB acquisition a couple of days away) they did remove it. So now is somewhere else (here you can find it and enjoy it) which makes me think about the real value of the YouTube traffic due to the following two reasons.
First, the video was embedded into blogs posts so when I tried to see it, assuming it was still posted in YouTube, I could have seen it without actually going to YouTube. So whatever advertising strategy that YouTube had implemented to monetize their traffic, unless they are embedding ads in the video (which they have publicly said they will not do), I will have not been exposed to that advertisement at all. I wonder how many of the 100 million daily downloads happen from blogs or MySpace pages without never going to the YouTube site.
Second, the video is now gone due to copyright infringements. People tend to upload videos to YouTube but I wonder what will start happening if all the copyrighted material gets removed quickly while other sites (in this case, Veoh) keep it there or people just place it in their own servers (as it also happened in this case). The media has been focused very much on the risk of YouTube (now Google) getting sued into oblivion by content holders but I think that the risk is not getting sued but actually losing the traffic and the market leadership the moment that copyright content is strictly forbidden from the site.
I guess we will have to wait few months to see how the acquisition develops but certainly is going to be interesting….
UPDATE: The New York Times has a story about Aleksey this weekend, apparently Aleksey has spoken and he claims that the story on his resume (the charity, the company, etc.) is true and that he is looking at suing UBS….
CD
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