Spamming has gone well beyond unsolicited messages via e-mail or Usenet. Unethical advertisers have resorted to spamming via Instant Messenger (spim), creating blogs for the sole purpose of deceptively attracting traffic that they then pass on to their web businesses (splogs), loading their web pages with irrelevant keywords and text so they'll come up highly for popular search terms (spamdexing), and more. And it looks like YouTube is not immune.
So how does spam on YouTube manifest and what's the best name for it... Spube? Yam? Given most of the other pejoratives have started with "sp", "spube" seems to be most in line with the trend. Despite that, calling YouTube spammers "yammers" feels very apropos, given that one of the definitions for "yammer" is "to talk loud and persistently."
There are two kinds of spam I've seen on YouTube. The first is what I call 'teaser spam". This is mainly targeted at men trying to find videos of hotties on YouTube. A bikini site or softcore site posts a 10-30 second innocuous video of one of their hot babes, then ends it with an invite to their site to see more. This seems to have been diminished over time. It still exists to an extent, and the videos are longer.
The second is what I call "overlay" spam. Certain unethical sites, looking to boost traffic, download a video they don't own, overlay their URL on it to make it seem like it came from their site, then upload the video to YouTube. This not only gets them exposure, but traffic at their sites where they're running ads and possibly using a service like Revver or MetaCafe to display their videos so they get ad revenues that way too.
Recently, when reading about the latest hoax video on YouTube, where a bride-to-be goes nuts and starts cutting off her hair with barely an hour until the big event, I went looking on YouTube to see what the fuss was.
A search for "bride cuts hair" turned up 5 instances of the video, two of which had the URL overlay for a site featuring mostly short porn clips surrounded by ads, showing that the spubers (or yammers) added their URL to the video after it started circulating. And if you think you're going to an innocuous site when you follow their URL, you're greeted with hardcore porn clip thumbnails right on the front page. Not only that, but they seem to make no attempt to keep out kids.
It's not possible to say for sure that they posted the video to YouTube themselves. But stealing it and putting what is basically a porn site URL on it... that's possible.
An example with a bit more scuzzfuggery to it is a fellow going by the name "X Aku". A recent abuser of the blogspot.com service, he's posted a variety of salacious videos he's recorded off foreign TV to his splog, using MetaCafe to earn money from people viewing them. He then reposts some of them to YouTube. These videos not only contain a message to come to his site at the opening, but he overlays his URL dead center on the screen.
And not only that, he spamdexes his site with loan and mortgage keywords. Yes, his splog is all about titillating videos and he's created a blog entry that is nothing but loan and mortgage keywords. He's stealing from the creators of the content, defrauding MetaCafe, Blogspot, YouTube, and anyone who stumbles upon his site while looking for loan information.
So would this be called "spubing your splog"? Sounds vaguely dirty.
Now, not everyone posting overlay videos to YouTube is a spuber. Some of it is legitimate. There are a large number of people creating original and entertaining video content on the web. Posting some of it to YouTube benefits them, YouTube, and YouTube's users. They get exposure, YouTube gets original content, and the users get entertained. And adding an overlay of their URL is valid, because they should get credit for their work.
Spubing (or yamming, or yammering) is when they post just part of a video as a come-on to draw you to their site or when, in more cases, they overlay their URL on a video they didn't create (particularly a popular one like the distraught bride cutting her hair), essentially stealing the video to benefit themselves. It seems even worse when they put a URL for a site containing porn on an innocuous video like the hair-cutting bride, because it chances drawing children to their site where there are no safeguards against the kids watching some seriously hardcore porn clips.
Probably everyone can agree that these practices are wrong. The questions are...
- How do you stop it?
- Is it Spube or Yam? And is the act spubing, yamming, or yammering?
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