The sites I chose were Dailymotion, Veoh, and Newgrounds, all sites I frequent and was interested in learning more about.
Business Model
The three I picked are actually radically different in this area. Dailymotion is by far the most professional in this regard. It has a specific page in its information section devoted to its corporate information, and this page details the type of company, publications director, telephone number, and even share capital and trade companies register, whatever that is. A lot of this information seems useless to the average user, but it certainly looks impressive—like they really know what they’re doing and can be trusted. It reassures users that it isn’t just running out of someone’s garage. Newgrounds, on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, did run out of its creator’s basement for more than ten years. Since then, it has moved into an office and owns some servers hosted in a facility in Philadelphia. The people running and maintaining Newgrounds are primarily the creator’s friends, and there are less than a dozen of them listed on the staff page. Also, I feel it is important to note that the Newgrounds staff page is formatted like a fighting videogame’s character selection menu. Not unlike Dailymotion’s straight-forward, just the facts corporate information page, this sends a message to users, and that message is: Newgrounds is fun and awesome, just like a videogame. Since Newgrounds features a lot of flash-based games, this actually makes a lot of sense. They might not be taken as seriously, but they are targeting their audience very efficiently. Veoh on the other hand is a privately held company with investors such as Spark Capital, Michael Eisner's Tornante Company, Time Warner Inc. and Shelter Capital Partners. Their mission statement is to
Give viewers a limitless marketplace of compelling or informative television programming for wherever and whenever they choose to watch.
Similarly to Dailymotion, Veoh has a clean, pristine page that displays this information, though they’re much wordier about it than Dailymotion. The page gives a professional feel that “leading technology and media investors” would be more inclined to invest money in.
Advertisements
None of the three sites requires a fee for joining, and all three feature advertising. On all three sites, the advertising is generally negligible, as it rarely fills a significant portion of the screen. Veoh keeps it off to the side in a separate, narrow column. Dailymotion features an ad prominently in the top right corner of its contents box, and smaller text ads above it, but only on the main page and during video browsing. Both Veoh and Dailymotion label their ads as advertising. Newgrounds has an ad at the top and bottom of every page, and an extra ad in a separate column on the pages that feature the most popular games and cartoons.
Both Veoh and Newgrounds both partner with DoubleClick for advertising, and both offer an opt-out option. This feature does not remove the advertisements, but it does remove the accompanying cookies. Dailymotion does not transmit personal data to third companies, but does collect and process it in order to create website statistics. Veoh does not disclose personal information except as necessary for certain services. Newgrounds gives information about users’ activities on the site to third companies, but no personal information.
Intellectual Property Rights
Both Newgrounds and Dailymotion explicitly state that the ownership of all content uploaded to their sites belongs to the user who uploaded it; however both sites retain the rights to reproduce and display user-generated works throughout the site. Veoh does mention that users have ownership of their uploaded works, though it’s hidden in a lot of technical jargon. All three sites restrict the reuse of uploaded user content without the consent of the user who uploaded it. They also all make express points of pointing out that user content is the sole responsibility of the user, and any consequences of those submissions are the responsibility of the user as well. Also, each site specifically states that uploading content risks that it may be stolen, and denies responsibility if this happens.
These intellectual property right policies seem to indicate that video sharing sites all have the same interests to protect when it comes to these issues. They all cover the majority of the same points, which all are all focused on protecting the site from copyright infringement issues.