Über-Efficiency; Blocking of YouTube videos in Germany

SecondHandSongs is adding ever more YouTube videos (50.000 soon!), enabling our users to discover and enjoy ever more new cover songs and musicians. Unfortunately our German users are often blocked from this pleasure. Thanks to GEMA, the German performance rights organization.

The occasional blocked video is thus not just the exception to the rule, but is the rule for German users: currently over 60 % of all 1.000 most popular videos are being blocked! Even notoriously oppressive regimes, such as for example Sudan (15%) and Afghanistan (4%), are not that strict!

Check out this App to learn more! Luckily there are plenty of ways around these blocking excesses: Tools. Enjoy your unblocked videos !

Your SecondHandSongs Team

Last edit: 2013-02-03 02:16:23 UTC by Limbabwe

Yes...point the finger on my poor German existence!

What German users see on our current homepage (see attachment).

So f...... GEMA ruins the new homepage design !!!

I wasn't that impressed anyway.

Quote from Mop66

What German users see on our current homepage (see attachment).

Makes me wonder: what do you see on WhoSampled.com?

This.

GEMA probably has the most extreme blocking system in Europe. We could only allow videos that aren't blocked anywhere, but given the stats that would considerably reduce the amount of videos visitors from other countries can watch. IMHO the GEMA people are living in the stone age. Instead of investing huge amounts blocking the videos, they'd better make a lucrative deal with Youtube.

I don't think it is an issue. German users are used to it and do not blame it on the site, but on GEMA. Everybody knows who causes the problem. In fact a lot of them know how to get around it in the meantime, if they really want to.

An easy solution would be to present our German visitors with a different homepage. Through IP Geo filtering these users can be identified and presented with a less YouTube centric homepage.

Now I feel double discriminated

As mentioned above, I don't think it is an issue and a separate homepage seems not necessary for me.

It's not that the Germans are more strict.

They are, as usual, more efficient.