When Jill and Kevin uploaded their wedding ceremony video to YouTube, never would they have imagined that their dance routine would go on to become one of the most popular videos on the web grossing over 51 million hits.
There was a small problem though. The background music (Forever by Chris Brown) that was used in the wedding video was copyrighted to Sony Music and therefore Sony had an option early on to get that video removed from the YouTube website.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Sony however chose the second option (monetization) and added affiliate advertising to the video allowing YouTube viewers to purchase that song directly from the iTunes store. As soon as they did this, that 18-months old song went back to #4 on the iTunes chart. The video creators got tons of publicity but no share in the revenue.
This interesting case was revealed by YouTube’s Margaret Stewart at TED.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoX-YihV_ew&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
