The importance of control

Are you really in control of your content?

A famous tire brand had a slogan: “Without control, power is nothing. It could be applied to online video: The power of social networks can backfire if content authors don’t have control.

The creator of a video posted on a social network (YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn, for example) is not the sole owner. He does not own his audience or his subscribers either. The author is only a co-owner of his video with the platform that hosts it. Thus, he cannot modify it, he can only delete it, knowing that it will never really be deleted. A social network does not have the same vocation and does not offer the same possibilities as a video management platform.

The issue of rights

A public content can be the object of an appeal concerning a right linked to the image of a person, to a music, to the quotation of a brand or a logo, to the representation of a place, to a disputed comment etc…. In this case, the options will be to negotiate or to delete your video, which will make you lose all its referencing, its comments, its “like”, its shares, etc.

In the news, we have seen the case of Eric Zemmour’s candidacy video which was very widely seen and included many images whose rights had not been purchased or whose use had not been authorized. Since then, access to this video has been restricted and most media sites no longer relay it. For the same reason of “moral rights”, the Louvre has requested the withdrawal of the video “declaration of the Louvre” of Marine Le Pen which was not subject to any prior authorization. Legal action by the rightful owners can be very expensive…

The loss of control is also a content that remains accessible after the expiration of rights that had been granted temporarily, the reporting by a user of a content deemed inappropriate or the automatic detection of an element subject to copyright. In these cases, your account can be blocked and the recourse will be very long and complex…

Other dependencies

Let’s also mention the fact that you can’t hide the popularity of a content published on a social network. When a video that required a big production budget only gets a few dozen views after several months, it can damage the image of its author.

When a content published on a social network is embedded or shared, you can’t know where or by whom. So you won’t know the conversations it generates.

Content creators are also well aware that they are subject to the rules of the platforms that bring them an audience but which they do not own. As Guillaume Desjardins explains very well in the site demonopolisons.video :

“But when you manage to find your audience and you get your subscriber count up, are they really your subscribers? Is it really your audience when you’re going to post a video and it’s not going to be distributed to your whole community? Because it’s going to go through algorithms that you didn’t choose? Or even like Facebook, which will offer you to pay to reach your subscribers? It’s good that they are not really your subscribers, but rather the platform’s subscribers. You have no other way to get in touch with your followers than by creating new content. You can’t send them emails. You can’t write them a message directly. The platforms, on the other hand, can send emails to all their subscribers.”

Guillaume Desjardins, producer and director

The lack of control is also the fact that platforms decide what ads and content might interest your audience. Their goal is to keep visitors as long as possible, not to interest them in your content.

Therefore, beware of “video referencing” which is in fact “YouTube referencing”: A video published on YouTube leads to YouTube, not to your site. True VSEO is something else.

Mastering corporate content

Until now, companies produced their own corporate content. With the democratization of production tools, high-speed Internet access and the strong appetite of Internet users for video, the sources for producing corporate content have diversified.

According to a study by Ooshot and Visionary Marketing, 64% of companies have or will soon have a “content factory”. More and more often, content is created by their employees (we speak of EGC for Employee Generated Content) or by their public (customers, members, partners… we speak of UGC for User Generated Content). These “Peer to peer” or “Bottom Up” contents do not escape the problems mentioned above and the control of their hosting is crucial. Without talking about censorship, some moderation or control must be exercised to preserve the confidentiality of sensitive information.

How to regain control?

To be able to :

• modify a video already published without losing its audience, its referencing, its integration links
• share a video on your social networks while keeping the possibility to replace it, to enrich it, to unpublish it, to apply an access control
• find out where your video has been embedded or republished and the conversations that these publications have generated
• block illicit or undesirable publications
• make your videos known to search engines to create traffic to your site
• secure and privatize  your content 
• plan the automatic depublication of a video that has reached the end of its rights
• allow your employees to publish content from the company’s internal network
• respect the GDPR without imposing the acceptance of advertising trackers
• benefit from a service guarantee, assistance and support

… you need to use a professional video platform.

It’s not free, but at least you’re not the product!