On Monday, hipster cool video sharing site Vimeo issued a statement regarding their new policy towards video game related uploads. You can read their announcement on their blog and, if you’re man enough, you can then plow through the 750+ comments from their community members. The gist of the new policy is that any content related to video games will automatically be deleted from the site. This includes all previously uploaded video game movies as well.

Their reasoning for this decision is two-fold. One of their points of reason is that these particular types of videos are resource hogs. Since the number of video game movie uploaders is such a small percentage of their userbase, but taking up the majority of the resources, I can understand their decision to no longer allow that kind of content.

If they had just left it at that I don’t think this whole issue would have blown up into the debacle it has become. But things get a bit messy with their other line of reasoning for the new policy. Here it is straight from one of their staff members:

Vimeo was created with the intent of inspiring creativity and providing a place to share video with friends and family. The Vimeo staff does not feel that videos which are direct captures of video game play truly constitute “creative expression”. Further, such videos may expose Vimeo to liability from the game creator(s), as we have already seen action from popular video game companies against videos such as these.

Yikes. So the staff at Vimeo is now dictating what is and isn’t “creative expression” now? That’s a pretty thin layer of ice these guys are skating on with that statement. It’s especially ridiculous when there are quite a few videos on Vimeo that many could argue don’t constitute creative expression. This high-brow stance is kind of off-putting to someone like myself who isn’t a registered Vimeo user but is a big fan of the site and the people who run it.

If you decide to read some of the comments (I stopped after I got into the 600s) you can see Vimeo’s attitude on this really shine through. Some of their remarks are a little discouraging towards their users (most of whom are video game movie uploaders that will be leaving now with this policy change). There’s also a some double talk throughout regarding their fears of legal recourse for allowing game footage on their site. They say they aren’t concerned but it’s mentioned specifically in the quote I used above.

Like I said, I’m a big fan of Vimeo and the people behind-the-scenes but I’m pretty sure this could have been handled a lot better than it was. Hopefully they’ve learned a lot from this experience. I’m 100% positive they feel they’ve done the right thing (and they probably have) but their methods leave a lot to be desired.

Last month I said I didn’t have a lot of faith in the accuracy of eBay’s statistics for their affiliate program.

A big problem myself and other affiliates within the program saw was a serious decrease in the amount of ACRUs our sites were getting. eBay continuously denied their was a problem.

Well, guess what? We were right and eBay was wrong.

From the eBay Partner Network blog comes a post, on July 3rd during the news vacuum of the Fourth of July holiday here in America:

As we mentioned on the discussion boards, we’ve identified an issue affecting the way ACRUs were being attributed to affiliates. Although on the eBay Partner Network we use the same underlying tracking system as on Commission Junction (Value Click’s MediaPlex), when we switched to the eBay Partner Network a small issue was introduced where in certain circumstances ACRUs were not credited to the right affiliate. Many but not all of our affiliates were affected.

So there you go. At least they’ve admitted their mistake and are starting to make amends. The bad part of this mess is that they’ve denied there was a problem since the program launched even though all of their affiliates knew something wasn’t working right with the ACRU tracking.

I recently launched two new mashup sites. I was meaning to post about these earlier but work and the holiday got in the way. Anyway, the two new sites are the Manchester United Report and the Real Madrid Report. Soccer is something I’ve wanted to expand my growing sports network into for the last six months or so but I never got around to actually putting sites together.

Luckily, I found a guy in the UK who was wiling to write the player biographies for each of the clubs for a more than reasonable price. It was simply a matter of copying and pasting his content into my mashup CMS and the sites were live.

I normally don’t talk dollar amounts on this blog but a lot of people are curious what various projects cost so this time I’ll reveal that information. The biographies cost $30 per team. Add another $10 per team for the domains and the cost of each site was $40. I spent about an hour or two adding all of the content into my content management system to get the sites up and running.

So for $80 and a small amount of my own time, I expanded my sports network by two sites and also added an entire new sport to the coverage. I’d say that was an incredibly good deal.