a few days ago Facebook proudly announced that they'd achieved eight billion video views a day that's really impressive until you learned that in the first quarter of 2015 seven hundred and twenty five of the thousand most viewed videos on Facebook was stolen amassing a total of 17 billion views sites and content aggregators steal videos from YouTube to go viral on Facebook these videos go viral because Facebook is cheating they rigged their algorithm so that videos uploaded into their player are preferred

to youtube links because users should be kept as long as possible on the site so Facebook can show them as many ads as possible this is after all their business model but it also cheats when it comes to views a view is counted after three seconds even if the video is muted which means that because of autoplay if you scroll through your timeline slowly enough you count as a viewer that means engagement is terrible compared to youtube views Facebook views plummet after a few seconds because most views are not real but large numbers are

impressive so Facebook keeps pretending while this force to virality is weird the real problem is the so-called freebooting the stealing of videos since facebook prefers its own player stolen videos reach way more people than the original lately this has happened to us more and more often the most recent example amassed 3.2 million views and 140 thousand shares in two days while our own post just reached 100,000 people and got shared one thousand times other creators are hit even harder smart for every day's videos

gets tilled in constantly getting viewed up to 17 million times but even this is dwarfed by examples like Tyrese Gibson a singer who steals viral videos like this one with 86 million views on his Facebook page he adds a link to buy his music too he's not alone in this a whole group of people have built their online presence around stealing other people's work this is really bad for independent creators contrary to popular belief stolen content gives creators close to no exposure at all only the thief and

Facebook profit from this quality content takes a lot of creativity time and love in our case a single video literally takes hundreds of hours to make even wait with more than a million subscribers are dependent on the ads and exposure without ads and the support of our generous patrons we could not make videos for a small creator a viral video can mean the difference between a career and a hobby on YouTube this kind of theft is not a problem because they have major safeguards that protect content from being stolen

although the Content ID system is far from perfect especially for film critics and gamers Facebook on the other hand pretends everything is fine and constantly announces one milestone after the other but things are not fine let's look at the process of claiming your copyright on Facebook in the last year 1 get an email or tweet from a fan that gives you a direct link to your video it's not possible to search for your videos on Facebook yourself you depend on luck to find your stolen videos to search for facebook copyright

infringement on Google because it's actually faster this way 3 fill out an annoyingly long contact form before watch the views on your Snowden videos rise 5 Facebook finally pulls the video conveniently the video has already gained a 99 percent of all the views it will ever get the thief doesn't have to fear any negative consequences at all this is what successful creators have to deal with constantly and on top of losing out in terms of exposure and money it just feels like a violation to be treated like that in a recent

statement Facebook announced they want to change but it's hard to take them seriously when it still takes days for a stolen viral video to be taken down and Facebook does not share the profits made from it at this point Facebook is not a partner creators look forward to working with they've built their video empire on stolen content and disregard for original content creators this is absolutely unacceptable for a corporation worth billions of dollars Facebook is already testing various monetization models that will give the

uploads 8 cart of the ad revenue which with the current state of play is troubling right now this is mainly being tested with big media companies but as creators we don't feel like we're being asked or taken into consideration by the giant that is Facebook what can you as a viewer do to help here if you spot stolen content on Facebook make a comment linking to the original content alert the original creator because only they can file a copyright aport share this video or the one done by smarter every day we all want the same thing a free internet that the

basis for creativity community and great stuff we sincerely hope that Facebook will soon become a partner instead an obstacle to this goal for more in-depth information we recommend this article by Hank green and if you want to support us in our endeavor to survive in the world of online video and make more videos you can do so on patreon calm