An idea in the back of my head is to use the Internet megaphone, search engine advertising, to try to reach people who have copies of sought-after lost media, and are willing to provide it.
I haven't done it yet, but I am considering to do so.
The advertisement could look similar to this:
or:
Followed by contact details.
Probably, Bing and DuckDuckGo are more useful for this than Google, especially if the piece of lost media in question is a YouTube video.
I highly doubt Google would allow requests for lost YouTube videos to be advertised on their search engine, given that they are opposed to people (even Premium users) owning permanent local backups of YouTube videos outside their ecosystem. The "downloading" feature of YouTube Premium doesn't store the video as a file in the download folder like one would expect, but instead in a proprietary format and in a locked directory only accessible to the YouTube app itself, making it useless for media preservation. (source 1, source 2).
They should actually be glad about people having local copies. If people watch from a local file rather than streaming from YouTube each time, it reduces the server bandwidth usage at YouTube. But it seems YouTube wants people to pay for any form of background playback or ad-free playback. Recently, they took taking technical measures to block background playback on third-party mobile web browsers (source).
But the main reason for downloading videos (as mp4 or webm file, no locked-in nonsense) isn't background playback or circumventing ads. It is preventing the loss of media. Those other things are just side effects.
Therefore, for YouTube videos, one would have to resort to alternatives like Bing and DuckDuckGo for asking for lost media. DuckDuckGo loads advertisements from Bing from what I understand.
Have you ever used search engine advertisements to ask for lost media? Do you have any experience with it?
This post is hereby released into the public domain (CC0 1.0).
I haven't done it yet, but I am considering to do so.
The advertisement could look similar to this:
Do you have a copy of "(video title)" by "(creator)"?
or:
We are looking for the video "(video title)" by "(creator)". Please send us a copy if you have it.
Followed by contact details.
Probably, Bing and DuckDuckGo are more useful for this than Google, especially if the piece of lost media in question is a YouTube video.
I highly doubt Google would allow requests for lost YouTube videos to be advertised on their search engine, given that they are opposed to people (even Premium users) owning permanent local backups of YouTube videos outside their ecosystem. The "downloading" feature of YouTube Premium doesn't store the video as a file in the download folder like one would expect, but instead in a proprietary format and in a locked directory only accessible to the YouTube app itself, making it useless for media preservation. (source 1, source 2).
They should actually be glad about people having local copies. If people watch from a local file rather than streaming from YouTube each time, it reduces the server bandwidth usage at YouTube. But it seems YouTube wants people to pay for any form of background playback or ad-free playback. Recently, they took taking technical measures to block background playback on third-party mobile web browsers (source).
But the main reason for downloading videos (as mp4 or webm file, no locked-in nonsense) isn't background playback or circumventing ads. It is preventing the loss of media. Those other things are just side effects.
Therefore, for YouTube videos, one would have to resort to alternatives like Bing and DuckDuckGo for asking for lost media. DuckDuckGo loads advertisements from Bing from what I understand.
Have you ever used search engine advertisements to ask for lost media? Do you have any experience with it?
This post is hereby released into the public domain (CC0 1.0).
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