The techie folk behind the Rugby World Cup have compiled some fancy graphs and slides to show how much ground the year’s biggest sporting event has made in the social web. But where are the YouTube videos?
Some snazzily-presented new data released on the official Rugby World Cup site this morning show that 3.6 million tweets mentioning the tournament have been sent since the kick-off on 9 September.
On the face of it, that’s a solid enough performance, with a couple of qualifiers: more than 7000 tweets were sent every second at one point during the Women’s football World Cup final in July, while the failure to nail down an officially-sanctioned hashtag – #rwc2011, #rwc11, #rwc and #rugbyworldcup were all used by Twitter users – was frustrating.
Over on Facebook, the tournament’s official page has upwards of 1.4 million fans but one of its tabs shows how they’re not really helping themselves. There’s a link to YouTube Videos, where you might think you’re going to find some videos of great tries, drop goals or key incidents from some of the games in New Zealand.
But no, there’s none of that stuff.
The Rugby World Cup YouTube channel has some good content – the Rugby World Cup Daily video is an informative synopsis of everything that’s going on during the tournament – but the on-field action, the footage everyone wants to view, and most importantly share, is conspicuous by its absence.
It seems that someone in the IRB has sanctioned a policy whereby any YouTube videos of Rugby World Cup action are rigorously found and pulverised as breaches of copyright.
So, the Sam Warburton red card incident? Israel Dagg’s line-break and brilliant pop pass to set up Ma’a Nonu’s try against Australia? The wizardry of Felipe Contepomi to set up Argentina’s fine try against the All Blacks in the quarter-final? Sorry, folks, but you’ll have to work off memory for those.
Clearly it’s a protection of the television networks who’ve forked out a pretty penny to win the rights, but really, going after the YouTube generation shows scant disregard for the realities of the social media world.
Taking place in an odd-numbered year, the Rugby World Cup never has to compete with major international soccer tournaments or the Olympic Games. That means it has the sporting world at its mercy every four years.
You’d think they’d try to maximise that, by gaining every bit of exposure they can. YouTube users could have done the Rugby World Cup’s promotion for it, saving the IRB a pallet of cash in marketing spend.
So actively removing videos from YouTube is not only ridiculously petty, it’s also ridiculously self-defeating.
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