Why Does Nintendo Want This Superfan’s YouTube Money?

 IN 2006, WHEN Masae Anela was 13, she wondered why her dad kept sneaking out in the wee hours of the night.

Eventually, she realized there was nothing untoward going on. Her father was going out before dawn to line up at local stores in hopes of scoring a Nintendo Wii for her. The console had just been released, and Anela, who had loved and played Zelda since as far back as she could remember (her earliest memories, she says, were of watching her mother play Ocarina of Time), wanted to play The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Zelda was an outlet for a girl who had been homeschooled since fourth grade and “pretty introverted and not very up for talking to anyone.” It didn’t get better as she got older, either. “I started developing anxiety when talking to people,” she says, “and I had somewhat of a speech impediment.”

A few years later, in 2009, a friend convinced her to start producing “Let’s Play” videos, in which gamers play through a popular game, comment on the experience as it happens and upload it all to YouTube. If you watch her first video, of The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, and compare it to her most recent work—also a Zelda game—it’s like meeting two different people. In the first, Anela (a nom de YouTube she uses for privacy reasons) begins hesitantly, apprehension in her voice, not sure why anyone would want to listen. Today, she’s effusive, excited, and entertaining. It explains why she’s got 50,000 subscribers. Watching her makes you want to play Zelda. She’s an enthusiastic ambassador for Nintendo, hyping its games like no other at a time when the company that introduced Super Mario is losing mindshare to Minecraft.

So why does Nintendo want to take her money?

Anela says she was three years into her YouTube career when one of her videos of Twilight Princess got caught up in YouTube’s “Content ID” dragnet, in which copyright holders can challenge someone’s use of their intellectual property. Ad revenue from her video, YouTube declared, would henceforth go to… Nintendo.

“That was the first time I really got hit,” she says. “In that sense, it no longer becomes mine.”

This is important, because YouTube videos by enthusiasts like Anela are a big deal. They are where gamers are getting more and more information about new games, and the quality of many videos is on par with network television. The explosion in the quality and popularity of these videos stems from the advertising revenue they can generate. No one is pulling down the kind of money internet sensation PewDiePie rakes in ($4 million a year, according to the Wall Street Journal), but you don’t have to make millions to quit your job and earn a living doing what you love.

There’s just one problem: Based on YouTube’s rules, if you use even a moment’s footage from a videogame, the owner of that game could claim all of the advertising revenue from that video, or have it removed. This process unfolds through an automated system that presumes you are guilty until you prove your innocence. You could win on appeal, but only in the sense that your ad revenue or video eventually is reinstated. An appeal also carries the risk of prompting the copyright holder to file a copyright strike against your video. Get three strikes and your account is deleted.

As YouTube, which declined to comment for this story, becomes a more prominent source of gaming news, reviews, and opinions, it risks losing the independent, unfettered voices that helped make that happen. And game publishers who push these cases may find it a Pyhrric victory if it keeps these YouTube stars from talking about their games.

In other words, Nintendo—which takes the most heavy-handed approach among game makers—could be stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. Then again, it could also be creating a new media landscape in which it controls the message, and takes a slice of the revenue besides.

FAIR USE AND FOUL PLAY
Content ID is an automated system created by YouTube. It lets copyright owners identify and automatically take action against uploads containing their content.

In a nutshell, copyright owners provide YouTube with a database of searchable material, and YouTube automatically compares uploads against this database. If a match is found—regardless of context—the copyright holder decides whether that video is blocked, muted (in the case of song used as background music in an original video), or monetized with ads of its choosing—thereby blocking any ads the video’s creator may have placed there.