YouTube is well known and praised for Content ID, its tool that identifies copyright infringement in seconds by matching the uploaded content with another video in the system. So if YouTube already has such an intelligent tool in place, where does manual claiming come in? And why is it important?
Content ID is a sophisticated tool that continues to improve. However it is still not without its flaws, the main one being the inability to identify anything that varies from the original source material. Covers, remixes and fan filmed live performances (or UGC) often slip through the cracks since the instrumental or lyrics may vary from the original references.
This is a problem because this type of content, though undetected by Content ID, still belongs to the rights holders of the original source materials. Manual claiming is therefore the key to capturing these claimable assets. And yet, rights holders, possibly due to a lack of understanding, resources or information, are still not investing in manual claiming on YouTube. All of these barriers thwart them from seeing the pay off: monetisation.
Consider this. The amount of money you can make per video depends on a variety of factors – expect more on that in a later blog post. Forbes estimated the pay rate is $5 per 1,000 views, but let’s err on the side of caution and consider a rate of $2 per 1,000 views. Let’s imagine that you pay someone $300 a day to sit there and claim small videos manually in your YouTube CMS. Considering that someone with a decent amount of YouTube CMS experience can claim at least 300 videos a day, and that 10,000 is the average number of views per video. Your ROI would be 1900%.
Don’t believe us? Let’s break it down.
- 10,000 views / 1,000 views = 10
- 10 x $2 = $20 per video
- $20 x 300 = $6.000
- ROI = ((6.000$ – 300$) / 300$) x 100%
- ROI = 1900%
This means that your return on investment would be 19 times your initial investment – 1900% of return.
Add to this the fact that UGC is growing strongly, with a 10% growth rate on YouTube alone, this means that the pot is getting even bigger and “finding the unfindable” through manual claiming could guarantee an exponential increase in earning profitable revenue for owners of music rights.
The outcome of understanding this undervalued gem, together with the goldmine revenue brought by UGC being shared with content creators, will be beneficial not only for rights holders but also for content creators.
