About Viral

Ex Myspace Employee Promotes Controversy and Family Guy Loves It

Family Guy is a billion dollar franchise but would they be valued so high if they placed copyright claims on all their YouTube content and disabled embedding?  Would Seth MacFarlane have been able to sign a 100 million dollar deal until 2012 for his creations?  This is largest contract out there now eclipsing Keifer Sutherland’s earlier 40 odd million deal for 24 which came before the writers strike a few years back.  Here lies a great example of New Media integration.  

News Corp. owns both MySpace and Fox.  MySpace connects peoples and makes it really easy to post video content and Fox broadcasts professional content.  

Now what happens when someone on any given social media platform decides to upload a file of Family Guy to their profile that also happens to be a part of a small revenue earning plan?  What if they upload a clip of 30 Rock does that change anything?  Do you get mad that the rights are yours or try and build around its popularity?

Either way both pieces of content earns 0 dollars of in revenue for the company but yet nothing can be done to the individual who uploaded the content [other than a copyright claim].  But News Corps. and companies in a similar position, like Viacom, have critized and thrown lawsuits at Google [in 2007] for YouTube’s involvement in copyright infringment when professional content ends up on their platform.

Here’s the kicker.  In the Stranger Festival DVD Hoite Polkamp [an ex MySpace employee in the Netherlands] talks to youth about how to gather a little attention for their videos.  

The hell with the rules, basically, I mean yah., ugh, even if there’s ever going to be anyone who’s going to hunt you down or like, find out that you were the guy who made this and illegally downloaded and ripped stuff off of YouTube etc. etc. the only thing it going to do is give you press.

So here we had MySpace’s own employee promoting piracy to generate attention via controversy.  News Corp. had [there are probably others as well] the very people working on their New Media distribution network pushing the thorn deeper into their content production business, but is that really the case?

Take a step back and look at the thorn a little closer and another variable reveals itself: $merchandise$.  Advertising is great, but looking into Family Guy a little closer brings to light the potential revenue model surrounding physical goods.  

Family Guy has a cast of unique characters that end up on T-shirts, Pez dispensors, cups you name it.  The more pervasive their images become the greater the growth of the overall fan base.  This translates into sales of short punctuated references to the show accompanied by character images that flow off the shelf.  Hence, why they have the online store: thefamilyguystore.com.

So rip the episodes, cut them together, create remixes, make the best of Stewie clips and upload or link it in your MySpace or Facebook because a revenue model still exists for making money off the Family Guy brand.  

We will leave you with two videos that scream controversy yet clearly take a viral status among the sea of Family Guy content.  Just to give you an idea of how popular Family Guy is on YouTube the first video “Puke-a-thon” has 9.5 million views and that’s only one of the many different uploads and remixes.  The clip’s front page related videos don’t dip under 1 million.  Now that’s a cartoon franchise! Enjoy.

Stewie Beats Brian: 11.1 MILLION!

Cheers