TMW Ideas

Panorama on the BBC last night made interesting viewing.

They are lamenting the upload of videos depicting criminal activity on site such as Youtube and Liveleak.
Assaults in slapping (I decline to call them happy slapping) videos, gang related activity being highlighted including a lot of gun posturing, various street fights.

A lot of it is hype, one of the many repeated clips was of some youths letting down the tyres of a police car which whilst being somewhat anti-social doesn't make you public enemy number one.
Youtube's response was pretty mealy-mouthed and they put themselves firmly in the “We just carry content, we don't create it. We don't wish to be censors.” Although this doesn't really chime true when you consider parent company Google's relationship with the Chinese state censorship apparatus.
The wider issue for Youtube means that if they start employing people to scan for unpleasant content like this then those people should probably start removing copyrighted content as well and Youtube will go back to being a home video library and a $1.9bn valuation seems a tad high.

Liveleak weren't even remotely apologetic and insist the content uploaded by users is a reflection of society.

Most important to we at TMW is the way that online advertising revenue is supporting these sites and that a lot of very big UK brands (O2, Virgin, Orange among others) were having banner content served up next to online classics as 'Best streetfights' and 'Merseyside police scum'.

However, the brands have all told Panorama that they knew nothing of the adverts - and have since ensured that they have been taken down.

Almost all blamed rogue advertising networks for putting them onto the website. Both Carphone Warehouse and O2 have sacked the advertising networks responsible.

Guy Philpott of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), which represents online advertising companies, said that brands were often not aware of where advertising networks were placing their adverts.
He said: “This is pretty lamentable isn't it? They (the brands) don't understand what happened in the chain for them to end up on this site. Online advertising is a fairly new science, you know, and it's grown a lot in the last couple of years. And there is an education process to be done.”

You have been warned.