Well, well.
“Taking a Memorial Day weekend break from his day job as “an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets unit,” Ben Edelman devotes hundreds of online words to “a man’s naked buttocks,” all glimpses of Angelina Jolie – gasp!, and prank phone calls by a pair of Canadian disc jockeys.
All of this entertainment content and more is available at Zango.com. That apparently irks Edelman, although the “why” is much less obvious – even after reading his “research.” Here are the facts about our business. Zango licenses and aggregates online entertainment content from approximately 100 different content providers. Edelman does not – thankfully – review our legal agreements relating to the licensing and use of that content. More to the immediate point, however, he does not let that lack of knowledge get in the way of biased, unqualified blogging.
Like all companies our size and larger in the online entertainment space, we make every effort to abide by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provisions regarding copyright infringement claims. We occasionally do receive copyright-related inquiries about content available at Zango.com and via our syndication platform. In each and every instance, we investigate those claims quickly and resolve them on a case-by-case basis, in accordance with the DMCA and its safe harbor. That job starts with the hard work of our content licensing specialists, who have secured permission to utilize the content available to Zango users on our site and via our platform.
Edelman does not like our business model or our content. He never has liked our model, and he probably never will. We’re fine with that, in large part because millions of consumers every day, month after month, year after year, accept the value proposition and do enjoy the content. But what are a few million happy folks amongst “friends”?
On that score, one thing can be said for certain: consumers enjoy Zango a lot more than they do Edelman’s content offerings, at least according to a recent comparison of Alexa rankings. In case you can’t see it, the barely visible line in dark red at the bottom of the chart is his traffic; the dark blue line at the top is Zango’s. And, for the sake of comparison, the olive green line in the middle depicts our partner Revver’s traffic.”
Link here.
Ben made a comment in response to this:
Interestingly, Zango does not respond to my demonstration of Zango showing explicit content unrequested.
But Zango does claim that its staff “have secured permission to utilize the content available to Zango users on our site and via our platform.” Sounds like it’s time to contact more rights-holders — Fox, HBO, Comedy Central, Playboy, etc. — to see whether they agree that Zango has in fact “secured permission” to use their works.
Alex Eckelberry