Close
Exit

WHILE Facebook’s new auto video playing feature has been mostly well received, especially by those who don’t mind heavily-subtitled videos of cooking hacks or Donald Trump roasts (NOT a cooking video), YouTubers JinnyBoyTV aren’t very happy with it.

And it’s not just ‘cos they’re #TeamYouTube – it’s because their work is getting ripped off.

Let’s back it up a little. In 2014, Facebook introduced a new feature that made videos play automatically when users scrolled past them on their news feeds.

By April 2015, Facebook videos were being viewed over over four billion times a day. By Sept 2015, that number had doubled.

The Couch with JinnyBoyTV: Ep. 1

It sounds more like a great opportunity for video creators like JinnyBoyTV, who have carved out a huge online audience with their short films. So why aren’t they happy with it?

For starters, there’s the practice people are now calling “freebooting”. That’s when someone rips your video, uploads it to Facebook as his/her own and gets all the views, personal brand exposure or, worse still, the credit.

“It’s quite sad,” said Jin Lim, the founder of JinnyBoyTV. “We produced a video for Samsung recently and it was doing quite well on our channel. It had like 400,000 views or something.

“Then this Facebook page from Thailand took our video, uploaded it to Facebook and now it has like 11 million views.”

What’s even more annoying for Jin is when some of these pages cut out their credits and logos from the videos. “Some even put their own watermark on the videos!”

The guys says it’s now an “on-going process” of getting freebooters to remove their videos.

But by the time they do that, the video would probably have lost most of its “virality”.

As YouTuber Destin Sandlin (the guy behind Smarter Every Day, which produces educational videos) said to Slate.com on the same issue, one or two days is “basically forever in Internet time”.

The same thing has been happening to Sandlin, according to the same story on Slate.

His video Tattoo Close Up (In Slow Motion) was a huge hit, getting over 36 million views on YouTube since it was uploaded in Sept 2014.

Freebooters who uploaded it on Facebook, on the other hand, got over 18 million views for themselves in the first two days alone. FYI, even if someone watches just three seconds of a video, Facebook clocks it down as a “view”.

Destin Sandlin’s “Tattoo Close Up (In Slow Motion)

Facebook has issued statements saying they are coming up with solutions to combat such intellectual property infringements, but it has been over a year since they made their big push for video.

If one or two days is forever on the Internet, then a year must feel like an eternity for people like Jin and Reuben.

For now, JinnyBoyTV will only post short trailers on their Facebook page that will direct people to their YouTube channel for the full video, something like this:

When your crush says these words to you.Full Video Here: https://youtu.be/VWcZVyCVvKo

Posted by JinnyboyTV on Tuesday, January 19, 2016

 

Funnily enough, JinnyBoyTV does not “boost” (paying to get your content pushed to viewers) its content on YouTube. It only does that on Facebook.

“The views we get on YouTube are organic,” said Reuben Kang, the other half of JinnyBoyTV. “But on Facebook, what we’ve learnt is that in order to reach your fanbase, you have to boost your posts.

“That’s just how Facebook works. Back in the day, when My Generasi first went viral, I could see hundreds of people sharing (the YouTube video) on my timeline. Today, even if they share it, we won’t see it as often.”

“It’s Facebook’s algorithm,” added Jin. “YouTube links don’t appear as much on Facebook anymore. We just have to learn to overcome it and come up with a strategy to get our videos out.

“Since Facebook is pushing their native videos a lot, we now just upload snippets of our films on Facebook and put a link with it to watch the full video.”

About

Ian is the editor of R.AGE. He hates writing about himself.

Tell us what you think!

Latest from R.AGE TV

Latest posts

Championing children’s education

Education director-general Datuk Dr Habibah Abdul Rahim speaks on the importance of empathy-based education, the challenges of adapting education policies in light of the Covid-19 situation, and her “dream” education system.

Read more Like this post22

I lost my mother to the Japanese war

 Whenever Allied planes bombed Sandakan town as part of its campaign to liberate Borneo, Daniel Chin Tung Foh’s grandfather would rush the whole family into a bomb shelter behind their house.  During its heyday, the British North Borneo Company had developed Sandakan into a major commercial and trading hub for timber, as well as […]

Read more Like this post17

A witness to the Double Tenth revolt

 Chua Hock Yong was born in Singapore, but his grandfather moved the family to British North Borneo (now Sabah) to establish their business in 1939 when he was a year old.  The Japanese invaded Borneo shortly after, but the family continued living in their shophouse in Gaya Street, Jesselton, now known as Kota Kinabalu.  […]

Read more Like this post21

An encounter with victims of the Sandakan Death Marches

 When the Second World War came to Borneo, Pelabiu Akai’s mother moved the family back to their village in Nalapak, Ranau.  Although the Japanese were known to be ruthless and brutal conquerors, they left the villagers to their own devices and Pelabiu had a largely uneventful life – until she came across gaunt-looking Allied […]

Read more Like this post19

Sarawak’s only living child prisoner of war

 Jeli Abdullah’s mother died from labour complications after giving birth to him and his twin brother. To his Bisaya tribe, this was seen as a bad omen, and his father did not know what to do with the twins.  Fortunately, an Australian missionary couple decided to adopt the newborns. But misfortunate fell upon the […]

Read more Like this post16

Lest we forget

AFIO Rudi, 21, had never thought much about his grandfather Jeli Abdullah’s life story until an Australian TV programme interviewed the 79-year-old about being Sarawak’s last surviving World War II child prisoner of war (POW). The engineering student then realised that despite living in Sarawak all his life, he also didn’t know very much of […]

Read more Like this post16
Go top