Should YouTube introduce revenue-sharing for reaction content?

For as long as there’s been content online, there have been pirates. Creators’ content is constantly stolen, and there are a number of companies, like Superbam, whose entire business is recovering revenue from reuploaded videos. What if a situation isn’t so clear-cut, though? Reaction content creators are, for the most part, in a grey area, where their videos can count as transformative works covered by fair use if they provide enough meaningful commentary on top of the original creator’s content.

But what counts as “enough”? And what happens if a reaction video overshadows the original?

Video essayist YouTuber Zackary Smigel is currently contending with those questions after fellow creator Asmongold reacted to his latest video—and, Smigel says, was the reason that video’s view count stalled at just over 300,000, while Asmongold’s reaction vid soared to nearly a million.

“I have no issue with people reacting to my videos in a transformative way—I actually encourage it,” Smigel tweeted. “But it definitely sucks to see my video slow down at 300k views while Asmongold’s reaction gets almost a mill. My vid was only up for 5 days, and it’s pretty much lost all momentum.”

His video, called What’s REALLY Driving Up Fast Food Prices?, went up Sept. 11. Asmongold made his own video just four days later, called What’s REALLY Driving Up Fast Food Prices? | Asmongold Reacts. To be fair, Smigel’s original video is around 16 minutes, and Asmongold’s reaction vid is 36 minutes, so there is a significant amount of Asmongold pausing Smigel’s video to say something about it, or speak to the chatters who were watching him record his reaction live. (Asmongold has since privated his video.)

We should also note that it’s pretty hard to prove that Asmongold’s video was the reason Smigel’s saw its view count taper off. Smigel has 150,000 subscribers, and his video viewership can vary widely; the video before his fast food upload got 40,000 views in a month, while one he posted in March about surviving off Chipotle for 30 days has 1.2 million.

“Give me a week at least next time @Asmongold,” Smigel tweeted, before following up to clarify that “I’m not mad at the player, but at the game.”

“Honestly, I feel like YouTube should have a system similar to quote tweets or a kickback system for reaction videos,” he said.

YouTube actually does have kickback systems, but not for creator-creator revenue splitting. Instead, they’re for production studios and record labels: It can siphon AdSense revenue from creators’ videos if they use copyrighted content like movie clips or music tracks, and send all (as in, the creator makes nothing) or some (the creator gets a cut) of that revenue to the studios and labels.

A system like that for creator-creator content usage could lessen some of the animosity around reaction content, and ensure that original creators are still compensated for people watching their content off their channels. It could be logistically difficult to implement, however, and platforms would also have to address those questions we mentioned earlier: When has a reaction content creator used too much of the original video? When have they provided enough additional content for it to be fair use? Does the amount of additional content not matter if the entire original video is included in the reaction content?

TikTok has sort of flirted with these questions, since dueting is a built-in feature of its platform. With duets, creators can take an original video and repost it to their account with their own video alongside it. TikTok mandates that a dueting creator’s video must be the same length as the original, and its inbuilt editor gives credit to the original poster…but even with all that, it still doesn’t do any kind of revenue-sharing.

There are millions of duets created on TikTok every day, making the implementation of a kickback/revenue-share system there more difficult, but YouTube may have an easier time doing it with long-form content. As things stand, however, we doubt it will implement this kind of system, since that would mean digging into the nitty-gritty of fair use and transformative works law. It’ll likely continue letting creators duke it out over using one another’s content.