Last night, spurred on by e-mail questions from Mark Glaser, I dug a little more into “the Comedy Central yanks vids” from YouTube story kept adding to my original post. I’m raising questions about what’s going on. Yes, videos have been removed, but is it a purge, or is it something else, a negotiating tactic, maybe?
Meanwhile, the No Fact Zone lives up to its name (which I realize is a satire, but … ):
Look, here’s the deal: YouTube did two searches for TCR videos, from what I can tell: “Colbert Report� and “Stephen Colbert�. It’s almost impossible to find a decent video with those two tags. However, many of the “saved� videos have obscure tags, or simply say “Funny� or “Comedy�. Those videos are much harder to find in the system. You pretty much have to know they are there. Those are the videos that have survived, and the videos that are circulating among fans.
No Fact Zone doesn’t link to search results for “Colbert Report” or “Stephen Colbert,” but I do … “Colbert Report,” 859 videos (roughly what it has been the past three days; “Stephen Colbert“, 1,149 videos (first time I’ve ever run that search). Pretty much all the video I’m seeing with those searches is “decent,” and much of it has been up for months and months, and some of it is new. As far as I can tell, Comedy Central video (1,890 videos) isn’t hard to find at all. YouTube is still the mother load.
More later, I presume.
UPDATE I: The Washington Post story this morning is balanced, and absent “the great purge” angle of most media coverage so far, adding some perspective.
UPDATE II: Scott Karp addresses the truth vs. rumor aspect of this story.
The blogosphere is a tremendous force for spreading rumors and, in some cases, disinformation — this story’s “truth� or lack thereof may well be surfaced by the blogosphere as well, given the countervailing force of self-correction.
Also read Dan Blank and Mathew Ingram. They are all addressing this post by Mark Cuban.
UPDATE III: Jeff Jarvis reports that NBC reports that Viacom is asking only for full programs be brought down. As comments on the post note, that doesn’t make any sense either. He also links to a post from FishBowlNY that notes a lot of CC clips remain on YT.
[tags]comedy central, youtube, colbert report, stephen colbert[/tags]
[…] EDIT: HowardOwens.com called me out on the fact that searching for “Colbert Report” on YouTube finds 859 results, and searching for “Stephen Colbert” finds 1148 results, as of this posting. I really didn’t pull this fact completely out of thin air. When trying to figure out why certain videos were deleted while others were not, I looked at the videos in My YouTube Favorites and compared the ones that were deleted verses the videos that survived. The characteristic of almost all of the videos that were deleted (which I cannot see on my Favorites list, but which are still visible on my Playlists) is that they had a combination of “Stephen Colbert” or “Colbert Report” in their tags. I also noticed that many of the videos that survived often only had “colbert” or “funny” in the tags and not “colbert report” […]
Meanwhile, the No Fact Zone lives up to its name (which I realize is a satire, but … ):
My momma always said if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.
I responded to your comment in my blog in the same post.
Who’s saying anything unnice? Just pointing out that it’s still very, very easy to find great Colbert Report vids on YT.
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