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Rebecca Black's 'Friday' For Rent On YouTube!? Well Not At The Moment

Alexia Tsotsis

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Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

Monday, June 13th, 2011
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So I’ve been sitting here for the past 30 minutes writing a blog opus about how Rebecca Black’s “Friday” is now a $2.99 YouTube Rental, heralding a new era for YouTube’s content monetization strategy and the idea of a meme as premium content … but guess what? It’s no longer a rental!

There are three possible explanations for why it appeared to be for rent earlier:

  • The brilliant geniuses at Ark Music Factory were experimenting with the YouTube Rental feature for about a couple hours in order to spark up some more press coverage.
  • A YouTube glitch set the video to “Rental.”
  • The feature was switched on by Black’s camp as an accident and then switched back off after media caught on to the story.

While I don’t know for sure, I’m going to go with “accident” and/or “glitch.” At least one user reported not being able to actually rent the video when clicking on the “Rent For $2.99″ function, while it was still available.

All YouTube partners have had the ability to charge a rental fee for their content for about a year, but paying around $1 a minute to hear Black drone on about the front seat and the back seat seems like a major major rip off, which is probably why the story made headline news in the first place.

What’s amazing is how many people actually cared about the video’s availability, even if the concern was ironic, much like the bulk of its 165,271,223 views. YouTube itself declined to comment officially, holding that it doesn’t comment on the status of individual videos.

Image via @Larsskou

Crunchbase

Company: YouTube
Website: youtube.com
Launch Date: February 2005
Funding: $11.5M

YouTube provides a platform for you to create, connect and discover the world’s videos. The company recently redesigned the site around its hundreds of millions of channels. Partners from major movie studios, record labels, web original creators, viral stars, and millions more all have channels on YouTube. YouTube is predominantly an ad-supported platform, but also offers rental options for a growing number of movie titles. YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who...

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