SUDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG (Germany)
BERLIN – When Germany talks about social networks, it is usually talking about Facebook and Twitter, not about YouTube.
And yet the video platform, with its 800 million daily users, is certainly in the Facebook league and is used by many more people than Twitter. The fact that YouTube has become the biggest pop-cultural archive in human history doesn’t come through in Germany.
The reason is the on-going conflict between YouTube’s mother company Google and the German copyright protection association GEMA, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports.
The practical result is that 61.5% of the 1,000 most popular YouTube videos are blocked. Compare that to 0.9% in the United States and a little over 1% in Germany’s neighboring countries Austria and Switzerland. In terms of YouTube, Germany is a developing country – even the Vatican and South Sudan offer a greater variety of top hits than Germany!
Screenshot YouTube
Blocked videos on a long list include the original version of Gangnam Style – with 1.2 billion views the most popular Internet video ever – and virtually all videos by teenage idol Justin Bieber.
YouTube hits in Germany consist, for example, of a video of a baby who bites (Charlie Bit My Finger – Again!) and The Gummy Bear Song. That is presumably the reason why Germans fail to recognize YouTube for what it has long been seen as elsewhere: the world’s most important social video network.
