Youtomb tracks taken down videos from Youtube

Youtomb is a MIT Free Culture research project that monitors the most popular Youtube videos for copyright related takedowns. The project is currently monitoring more than 220000 videos at Youtube and has identified a a takedown rate of nearly 8%, a pretty hefty rate.

The website lists a screenshot and the name of the video, the category that it appeared in at Youtube and the views that it received. The interesting information is probably the company or individual that asked for the takedown of the video. Lastly the date of the takedown and the time the video was available at Youtube is also mentioned.

The statistics page lists all the reasons why a video was taken down. Exactly 4413 videos have been taken down due to alleged copyright violations while the remaining 13424 videos have been taken down for other reasons including adult content and TOS violations.

The site makes it possible to take a look at all videos taken down by a specific company and it would probably make a nice research project to identify the reasons behind the takedowns.