The value that leaks out of video every year.

Here is a scenario that plays out thousands of times a day. A creator or a library produces a genuinely great clip. It gets picked up. It spreads. Within a week it has been reposted across dozens of accounts on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, racking up tens of millions of views in aggregate. By any measure of attention, it is a hit.

And the people who own it capture a tiny sliver of the value it created — if they capture any at all. The views accrue to whoever reposted it. The ad revenue, the follower growth, the brand deals that follow: those go to the accounts that took the clip, not the people who made it. This is the central economic fact about social video today, and almost nobody has named it plainly: the value and the ownership have come apart.

Where the value actually goes.

It helps to trace it. Think of the total economic value a piece of content generates — all the attention, engagement, and downstream revenue it produces across the internet — as a single pool. Then watch where it drains.

The first and largest leak is unlicensed reposting. A clip that works gets copied — downloaded, re-uploaded, clipped, stitched, and mirrored across accounts that have no relationship with the owner. Each repost captures attention that the original owner never monetizes. On most platforms, the reposter, not the originator, earns from those views.

The second leak is the absence of a licensing path. Even the well-intentioned users — a brand, a media company, a larger creator who would happily pay to use a clip legitimately — often have nowhere to go. There is no standardized way to say “I want to license this, here is a fair price, here is the paperwork.” When licensing is impossible, even people willing to pay end up using content for free, because that is the only option available to them.

The third leak is the absence of enforcement. When unlicensed use carries no consequence, there is no reason for anyone to choose the licensed path even if one exists. Free and unenforced always beats paid. This is the leak that makes the other two permanent: without enforcement, there is no pressure that pushes value back toward the owner.

Why this is a market failure, not a moral failing.

It is tempting to frame this as a problem of bad actors — people who “steal” content. That framing is mostly wrong, and it is unhelpful. Most people who repost a clip are not hardened pirates; they are ordinary users who saw something good and shared it without a second thought about who owns it. The problem is not that people are dishonest. The problem is that the infrastructure for honest behavior does not exist.

This is exactly the situation the music industry faced a century ago, and they diagnosed it correctly: when the transaction cost of doing the right thing is higher than the cost of doing nothing, the market fails. A bar owner in 1910 was not evil for having a band play popular songs without paying the composer — there was simply no practical way to pay. The fix was not to shame bar owners. The fix was to build a system (the blanket license, the collecting society, the enforcement behind it) that made paying easy and not-paying costly. We wrote about that full blueprint separately.

The recovery path.

If the leaks are structural, so is the fix. You do not recover this value by chasing individual reposts one at a time — that is a treadmill. You recover it by building a system that turns detection into resolution at scale. Each stage narrows the funnel, and the output of the funnel is the value flowing back to the owner.

The critical design choice is what happens at the bottom of that funnel. The naive answer is “take everything down.” But removal alone just destroys the value — it does not capture it. A removed video earns nothing for anyone. The more sophisticated answer, and the one that mirrors how music actually monetized, is to resolve each case toward the outcome that creates the most durable value:

• License where there is an ongoing relationship worth building — a brand or media company that will use this kind of content repeatedly and should simply become a paying, recurring partner.
• Settle where the use has already happened and the relationship is transactional — resolve it fairly, with documented and transparent pricing, and move on.
• Remove where there is no legitimate path — the backstop, not the default.

This is the difference between treating enforcement as a cost center (lawyers sending angry letters) and treating it as a revenue engine (a system that converts unlicensed use into licensed, recurring relationships). The first is what the video industry mostly does today. The second is what music figured out, and it is what turned an “unprotectable” good into a multi-billion-dollar asset class.

What this is worth.

The prize is not abstract. The creator economy is already a roughly $250 billion market, projected to reach about $480 billion by 2027. The overwhelming majority of that is video. Yet almost none of it currently flows to rights holders through a collective licensing mechanism — because that mechanism does not exist yet. For comparison: global recorded music, an industry built entirely on the rights infrastructure video lacks, is a roughly $28.6 billion business, and US performance-rights organizations alone (ASCAP and BMI) each collect on the order of $1.5 billion a year.

The video industry does not need to invent anything conceptually new to capture a meaningful share of its own value. It needs to build the layer that has been missing: detection wired directly into review, licensing, and enforcement. That is the leak, and that is the fix.

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