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The cottage industry of YouTube obituary pirates
- creer 3y agoFascinating. Arbitrage re-monetization of obituaries.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- slyall 3y agoOn the other hand the legit end of the business isn't that great. Newspapers charge for placement in print and then legacy.com or whoever will charge to have the information visible.
- sickcodebruh 3y agoI encountered versions of this days ago. Someone I knew for decades died suddenly, unexpectedly, too young. Trying to learn what happened, I searched for his name and found YouTube videos and AI-generated “news” articles that spit out variations of the same public information. It was unsettling but also pointless, nothing but noise in a situation that was already so upsetting and confusing.
- Scoundreller 3y agoyeah, it's not just Youtube, text http/web is full of these too.
- 13of40 3y agoI just ran into one 30 minutes ago. There was a song stuck in my head and I found out it was by a different band than I always thought, so I DuckDuckGo'd a comparison between the bands. The first hit was a completely reasonable sounding article about how Band B covered a song by Band A as a single and also put it on one of their albums. Except they supposedly did it two years before Band A did the original song, the single doesn't exist, and although Band B's album exists the song isn't on it. A few years back I would have assumed someone was talking nonsense to crank out an article, but now Occam's Razor says it's just a fluff AI piece.
- ilamont 3y agoThere's a similar phenomenon on "Find-A-Grave" (https://www.findagrave.com https://www.findagrave.com) which was a quiet old-school genealogy site used by family historians and researchers until private equity took it over via Ancestry.com. The current PE owner, Blackstone, installed an ex-Facebook exec as CEO of Ancestry/Find A Grave who instituted a gamification system. Thanks to this engagement tweak, many deaths from accidents to natural causes are quickly "claimed" by random people. Quoting genetic genealogist Roberta Estes: The problem is that finding your loved one’s memorial, often with incorrect information, created by a stranger is unexpectedly jarring, at best. Especially to discover that your family member was only a trophy harvest whose memorial was created hours after they died. Then, having to ask (sometimes beg an unresponsive person) for the transfer of their memorial to you, only to have the creator’s name forever associated with the memorial adds insult to injury. https://dna-explained.com/2022/06/02/find-a-grave-owned-by-ancestry-seriously-just-stop-incentivizing-the-creation-of-memorials-of-the-recently-deceased/ https://dna-explained.com/2022/06/02/find-a-grave-owned-by-a... What's particularly disturbing are the "memorials" created by strangers to victims of major accidents, mass shootings, and other tragedies: Even with the photo and some information hidden, for now, the Uvalde victims’ memorials are still listed. The one above is the same child’s memorial as in Judy’s article. Even after eventually transferring the memorial to a family member, the original creator is always still listed. Unfortunately, this practice of awarding points and forever listing the “creator” by Ancestry encourages and incentivizes “trophy hunting.” Family members and genealogists have been infuriated by the Find-A-Grave situation, but Ancestry's management team has basically shrugged and said "tough luck."
- bombcar 3y agoit would be so simple for them to gamify the actual thing they want, by just restricting it to graves that are at least X years old. But they don't want to fix it.
- cush 3y agoAfter a decade of declining search result quality, you'd think Google would have made some headway at busting through this kind of blatant SEO highjacking. It's interesting what kind of scummy markets emerge when there's no rules, no barrier to entry, and the only thing you need to earn a profit is to get views.
- AequitasOmnibus 3y agoThis is a legitimate use of a DMCA takedown. The author of the obituary (presumably the decedent's family or friends) owns the obit and therefore owns the copyright to it. Whether Youtube would honor that type of takedown is a different question, but it's as legitimate as any other copyright takedown and not subject to any fair use. A better approach, in my opinion, would be for websites like legacy.com, where the obit author originally posted, to seek authorization to pursue DMCA takedown requests on these obit pirate videos through a clickwrap agreement when the author makes the initial post. That way, there's value-add for the original obit-posting website, and it adds legitimacy/weight to the DMCA takedown requests because YT can centralize the DMCA takedown processing from fewer sources.
- thefourthchime 3y agoUsing any kind of legal routes is probably a complete dead end. The real problem here is the advertisers and the revenue that comes from it. It's disgraceful that YouTube and Google have these show up so high on the list when it's so clearly fraud. Facebook is no better.
- oxonia 3y ago"Dead end"
- yccs27 3y ago?
- beezle 3y agoI think one needs to be a little more specific - it is not the advertisers, it is the company that is responsible for selling and publishing their ads. Google.
- actionfromafar 3y agoBut… money?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- darkclouds 3y ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 3y agohttps://archive.ph/aQufk https://archive.ph/aQufk
- CSMastermind 3y agoMaybe Youtube should start charging $1 per video uploaded or something.
- ipaddr 3y agoOr watched
- Scoundreller 3y agoSeeing Google try to turn YouTube (something kinda democractic where anyone can publish and search should be the great leveller) into something like Netflix (pros content only, old Yahoo style directory) is fun to watch.
- Rustwerks 3y agoIt would probably work if it were just a -$1 ad credit on each download? Except it looks like they are making their money here on sponsorship and upsells rather than youtube ad revenue.
- Jach 3y agoThis worked so well for twitter blue
- fritzo 3y ago> manipulating bereaved people into buying sympathy gifts like candles or flowers and pocketing the money. That's a lot of melodrama to say 'selling'.
- ada1981 3y agoSo weird. A life long friend of mine went missing this spring and then turned up dead, from an opioid overdose. I was one of the people looking for her and these videos kept getting sent to me, and they had inaccurate information. Was a bizarre experience. Also so auto generated articles popped up as well.
- netsharc 3y agoAh, stupid attention "economy", or whatever this dystopia is called. Somewhat relatedly, an actress once told an amusing anecdote on UK the TV chat show "Graham Norton", I was curious about it, so I googled it as I was watching, but there was nothing. Right as the show ended I googled again, hundreds of results, but all the articles I found mentioned that she told this anecdote on the show (so if I wanted to learn more about it, the articles won't help since they're just rehashes of what I just watched). WTF, hundreds of search results, a few minutes after she told the anecdote! I now guess somebody wrote it up, published it and maybe linked to it on Twitter, some content-farming bots notice $ACTRESS_NAME trending on Twitter, and their algorithm realize there's audience eyeballs to be gained there, and found the freshest article about her, on Twitter I suppose? Thanks a lot Brin/Page.. you're welcome for buying you private jets!
- Scoundreller 3y agoPrivate jets are cheap, because nobody bothers with truly custom builds, nor wants to fly something unproven. Private yachts are what they're thankful to afford, the sky is the limit for those!
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoAfter all, a yacht is just a hole in the water into which you must constantly shovel money in order to keep it open. Probably actually one of the ways billionaires reluctantly cycle money back into the normal economy more effectively, considering the enormous labour needs in design, build and operation! Per the teachings of supply-side Jesus.
- tim333 3y agoFor 99.99% of the population they are not cheap.
- praptak 3y agoThey got the private jets for actually solving this problem (then). Too bad they don't seem interested in keeping it solved.
- Tao3300 3y agoYep. Still got ublock origin on. I'm playing a misère game of chicken against YouTube where I'll win when I lose.
- vasco 3y ago> But if local papers presumably have the community’s interests in mind when they share death notices, those reading obits on YouTube seem to be in it solely for the clicks. Not sure what the huge difference is. If it's in bad taste, it's in bad taste, otherwise it's not like newspapers do obituaries out of some pure heart dedication to the community, they'll gladly sell a funeral home service ad next to it all day long as well.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoIt’s more direct than that. Most obits in the paper are paid for.
- dventimi 3y agoOh, please. Grow up. This is not "piracy."
- jfax 3y agoAgreed. Astounded how stretched the word piracy is nowadays, I've been seeing it used for even stuff like using an ad-blocker. My policy is to only use it to refer to actual at-sea piracy.
- janstice 3y ago“Piracy” has been used in relation to IP since the 1700s. It’s not a new thing (think pirate radio, pirate buses).
- dventimi 3y agoNot by people who copy and share information, it hasn't. People who stand to gain from the spreading of an idea WILL tend to spread it, but that doesn't mean the rest of us have to accept it.
- oefrha 3y ago> Their subscriber numbers are modest, making it all even more puzzling What’s puzzling about this? Someone writing an article about baity social media accounts surely knows a YouTube account has to have a minimum number of subscribers to receive ad payout (mentioned in TFA), and that like every other stat online, it can be bought with money? They don’t need to “amass” actual fans.
- JacobSeated 3y agoThe part about search engine optimization is most probably highly inaccurate; you do not need special SEO skills to rank highly for low-competition niches, so that's that. The key part, I think: ...the business model focuses on quantity over quality... This shows that you are dealing with inept spammers, and not someone that is particularly skilled at either SEO or mass-content creation. This model can be killed practically overnight if YouTube cought up on it.
- aaron695 3y agoI do notice when searching for someone often you'll come across obituaries for someone else. I wouldn't rule out they are not actually targeting the relatives of the dead person. Alive celeb obituary industry - https://twitter.com/BoneJail/status/1645991572008255489 https://twitter.com/BoneJail/status/1645991572008255489 I see an opening for live persons obituaries, just rip them off Facebook. I'd like to watch my own.
- jalapenos 3y agoAn archetype of the "bottom-feeder" if ever there was one.
- lordnacho 3y agoI don't get how this is worthwhile to do though? Don't you need a huge number of views to get ad money, and won't 99% of people bounce when they realize what the video is? Another one of these weird things is football (soccer) highlights. If you look for the highlights of a recent match, you will find a load of videos with the team names, date, and score. But the video will be... a clip from a game of FIFA. As in, obviously not video of the game you were looking for, and not a reproduction of the action either. Just a screencap of some video game. How can something like this monetize?
- jprete 3y agoIt doesn’t have to monetize well, it just has to monetize enough to make up for the tiny amount of CPU involved in putting it together.
- theshrike79 3y agoIt costs 1 cent to make so it only has to generate 2 cents of profit. Now repeat this a million times. Economies of scale and all that.
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoVisible downvote counts used to help fight such shovelware trash.
- OJFord 3y agoRelated/taking this further, and what I thought this was going to be about, apparently there's AI-generated Jennifer Aniston discussing/paying 'her' tribute to Matthew Perry. But a complete fabrication. (Not going to search for and link it to give it any more of a boost.) I'm sure that's not the only or first example, but that's the one I heard about.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ElCapitanMarkla 3y agoI found a weird situation kind of like this during covid. A friend of a friend died and loads of videos popped up on YouTube announcing the death, blaming the covid vaccine. The really weird thing to me was that they weren’t automated, they were made by people with Indian accents narrating them. The death occurred in small city NZ which made these videos even more bizarre. I guess it was just someone paying to pushing their antivax agenda, it was just bizarre.