User Comments On NFL.com and MLB.com Starting To Look Like YouTube's

Over the last few months, I'm noticing that a larger percentage of fan comments on NFL.com and MLB.com are starting to look like those on YouTube. Readers are posting comments that contain racial slurs, four letter words, physical threats to others as well as additional content you'd think the NFL and MLB would not want to allow.

Unlike YouTube, the NFL and MLB have professionally produced content with lots of major advertisers who can't possibly want to advertise around such user generated comments. And while no one expects every bad comment to be caught, it seems as if neither the NFL or MLB is even trying to do anything about it. It's very easy to find dozens of such comments, many times in the same subject thread on both of their sites.

On NFL.com, they are being even more careless when they randomly take user comments from the site and highlight them, in big fonts, right on the main page, as you can see here. One has to wonder why either organization would allow this, unless they don't care since user comment sections drive up their page views. One of the excuses we hear as to why it's so hard for YouTube to generate ad dollars from the vast majority of their videos is that advertisers don't want to be associated with specific UGC content or the comments that gets generated from those videos. So why would the NFL and MLB put monetizing their content with their advertisers in jeopardy?

I sent inquiries to both the MLB and NFL asking for them to explain their policies around user generated comments, but weeks have gone by with no answer from either company. Whatever their policies are, clearly neither organization is doing enough to address this and it's simply a bad business practice on their part to ignore it. The NFL and MLB logos/websites are highly valuable brands, being tarnished by a lot of really bad comments from users.

Comments

[Kieran Kunhya]

I don't think the nature of poor commenting is specifically a video-related issue, however, it's clear it will damage the value of online video. Such a thing is also apparent through a lot of the BBC's blogs and message boards and also in the comments section of many newspapers over here in the UK.

It seems that a lot of the people who will make an effort to post in comments already have extreme views and the feeling of anonymity behind a keyboard exacerbates this. This is not helped by the fact that many relatively newer internet users aren't aware of the practice of "internet trolling", which continues the cycle.

As hard as it is to say, some people's views aren't worth bothering about yet social media makes everyone's views equal. Having said that I've seen some very well thought out discussion about physics and space in the Nasa channel on Youtube, which gave me a little bit of faith in internet commentary. Youtube did A/B test a profanity/racism filter a while back but it seems it didn't get deployed fully.

[david whitehead]

MLB does not surprise me. Anyone try to use their $9.99 on line "coverage" of post season games? I e mailed them 40 mins into the first game saying pls cancel and they refused on delayed response.