The YouTube, TotLoL story is a cautionary tale for news sites

As a YouTube Partner, I was interested in today's TechCrunch article about how the company TOTLOL's entire business model was harmed by a change in YouTube's "Terms of Service" rules, such that it had to shut down operations. I'm going to simplify the lingo for consumption, and you can read the more lingo-based version of the story at TechCrunch.

TOTLOL

TOTLOL's is a community website that allows you to see videos for kids. It uses a YouTube website building system called a YouTube API, or "Application Programming Interface". The cool aspect of TOTLOL was that one could pick out videos from YouTube to watch that were kid-friendly, which is at times hard to do on YouTube.

The problem as I get it from reading Erick Schonfeld's work at TechCrunch, is that YouTube and Google realized that TOTLOL was making ad money from using its own advertisers and not those with YouTube and Google. So TOTLOL claims that YouTube and Google changed their "Terms of Service" rules to prevent that, thus throwing TOTLOL out of business.

As a YouTube Partner, I know YouTube likes the development of original video content and rewards that. I can say their program is awesome, taking nothing away from anyone else's and just sharing my experience with the YouTube Partner Program.

But this story is different because we're talking about TOTLOL making money off the videos created by others like, say, Cullens ABCs, who specialize in making kids videos and like me is a YouTube Partner. (We know each other). I think YouTube is trying to protect content partners like us in this case.

But in doing so, YouTube and Google may have hit a conflict that would harm use of their API by news sites. Let's say SFGate.com or the NY Times created a website like TOTLOL and sold its own ads. Both would run against the "Terms of Service" set up by YouTube and Google. Now to be clear, we're not talking about a video player, ok?

 So if you don't technically get the difference, a video player is not what TOTLOL is. It's like taking YouTube and remaking it for specialized use. TOTLOL is not a video player slapped on a blog site.  Plus TOTLOL is not making its own videos, which is the issue.

OK? More complicated.

Back to my point. As a YouTube Partner, I think as long as any site like TOTLOL or SFGate.com or the NY Times is causing existing videos to gain views and is using a YouTube API in a creative way, they should be able to use their own ads. YouTube and Google should encourage some kind of ad mixing system, rather than the "it's my sandbox" take they seem to be using.

Doing so would help news website offer more compelling pages with videos. What is interesting to me is that it was TOTLOL that created this problem and not a big news site.

Stay tuned.