Eyal Arad

The through-line

Eyal Arad's core argument is that the video industry has spent a decade mislabelling its most valuable audience behaviour. The technology behind Videocites was built to find every copy of a piece of content across social media, and for the first years the only question anyone asked of it was how fast something could be taken down: "the business back then was mostly you know pirated content. Everything was considered pirate pirate piracy" [3]. About five years ago he began pushing the company, and his clients, toward what he calls "the positive side of copies, meaning how fans create content around you and it's not considered piracy" [3]. Videocites still does anti-piracy work, but the larger part of the business is now analytics over what fans make [3].

The consistent posture is that of a data person arguing against a reflex. Rights holders inherited a policy ("show me only the how you take it down") that no longer matches what their fans are doing, and Arad's job is measurement first, persuasion second: "that's to us it's an educational process. We need to go league by league, show them their case studies, show them how they can use it" [3]. The same preoccupation runs through his broader account of building fan communities and digital presence, where he treats monitoring tools and data analytics as the instruments brands use to strengthen their standing on social platforms [1][2].

On where piracy actually stops

Arad draws a hard line at live. Someone live streaming a game or an event is piracy with no ambiguity, and Videocites will "take it down within uh 3 to five minutes" [3]. Everything else is a policy question rather than a legal absolute, and the thresholds vary widely: some rights holders want a ten-second clip of a golf shot or a basketball court blocked, others treat three, five or ten minutes as fair use, and "a lot of it now is in the middle" [3]. His framing for the permissive middle is conditional rather than sentimental. Let the audience create, as long as the content can be tracked, shown back to the rights holder, and turned into revenue and analytics for marketing, sales and sponsorship, and creator programmes; if something runs too long or breaks the policy, it comes out [3].

The live boundary also explains why he sees archives as such an obvious opportunity. Broadcasters have no objection to archive use, so leagues can work with AI tools, from companies such as WSC, to cut fresh clips from their libraries quickly and automatically, opening a new revenue stream on YouTube and other platforms and a way to work with creators [3]. He calls this "a very clear differentiation and very efficient way of using AI to build new tools for monetization while not upsetting your marketers" [3].

On why UGC has a bad reputation it does not deserve

The strongest empirical claim Arad makes is that the industry's fear of fan content rests on a false premise. A case study he was releasing showed that "over 90% of user generated content over 90% is not game footage" [3]. The whole objection had been about not upsetting broadcasters who had paid for game rights, and the data collapses it: "Now we're showing them guys it's less than 10%. Most of the fan created content it's valuable. It's gaining millions and millions of views and and engagements that you were just not looking at" [3]. He is candid that the label itself is part of the problem, agreeing that the acronym carries a bad reputation and noting that he sometimes calls it created content instead [3].

He rejects the related fear that fan short-form during an event cannibalises the broadcast. One client compared Videocites real-time data on non-live short form during events against Nielsen live engagement data and found the reverse: "It's not stealing your eyeballs. If you create engaging content ... people go and open the TV to see what's going on" [3]. His reading is that the two are complementary, that audiences consume across more than one screen at once, and that younger viewers in particular are interested in everything outside the live event, which makes fan content a way to reach people who were never going to be reached by the broadcast alone [3].

On the ten-times sponsorship number

Arad's commercial case is that teams systematically undersell themselves because they only count their own channels. A team can show a sponsor that its patch appears in owned content, but "beyond your own channels, your media partners are creating content around you ... your influencers, your fans are creating content around you," and the sponsor's brand is visible in all of it [3]. Measured properly, the effective brand exposure "could be 10 times bigger than what you're showing them today," and 10x is the average he sees for teams; the multiple is sometimes lower for leagues simply because leagues produce so much of their own content [3].

He frames this as transparency rather than inflation, and argues the demand comes from both sides. A brand deciding where to buy an MLB patch wants to know which property delivers the best return including its fans, so "this is where I want to be investing my money" [3]. LAFC has run this with its sponsors for several years and was able to show improving value year over year, with the added point that the fan-created share is not random noise but a growing component, which matters to a brand assessing a multi-year commitment [3]. Brands, he notes, still need educating on this too [3]. The same number has uses beyond sponsorship: a team or league is itself a brand, and a reach figure three, five or ten times larger is powerful for PR, for benchmarking against other teams in the league, and for attracting audiences and players [3].

On fans as the influencer bench

The most advanced use of the data, in his view, is talent discovery. Fan creators who have already built hundreds of thousands of followers making content about a team are, by definition, aligned audiences: "their fans are or their followers are your fans as well. These guys are the best influencers or micro influencers you would want" [3]. Clients are building creator and influencer programmes by surfacing these people from the fan base rather than prospecting cold, and Arad's argument for tolerating their use of the IP is that they reach places and speak in registers the rights holder cannot: "they have a different voice than us. They we would never be able to create the content in the way that they're creating it" [3].

He makes the international case concrete. A league or team pushing into a new market should find the creator in Brazil who already posts about them with 200,000 followers, bring them into the ecosystem and supply them with content and tools [3]. The scale point follows from that: "You don't need to have a small influencer program of 20 people. You can make it thousands just by opening up to your fans globally" [3]. Underneath it all is a single reframe he keeps returning to, that "they're not pirates, they're your fans. If they're not streaming your game, they're your fans. They're doing it because they love you" [3]. His wider commentary on fan communities and digital presence rests on the same premise, that advanced monitoring and analytics are how a brand turns audience activity into loyalty and impact [1][2].

On how far the industry has actually got

Arad's assessment of maturity is uneven by organisation and by region. Some leagues are at the forefront, constantly learning from the data, while others are still unsure whether fan content is piracy at all [3]. The US he describes as business-oriented: show that there is extra money in YouTube monetisation or fan-created content and it becomes a business. Europe moves more slowly and weighs other considerations [3]. His model of a mature client is one where the data spreads across the organisation rather than sitting with one team. He cites the NBA, an early adopter of Videocites data, where "every business unit within the within the NBA almost every business unit is basically looking at this data" for its own purposes, from marketing understanding how content echoes with fans, through to the effect on production decisions [3]. The persistent obstacle is not technical, it is a resistance to UGC that has to be dismantled case study by case study [3].

Takeaways

• Live streaming of an event is unambiguous piracy and gets taken down within three to five minutes; everything non-live is a policy threshold that varies by rights holder, from blocking ten-second clips to permitting ten minutes as fair use [3]
• More than 90% of user-generated content around sport is not game footage, which removes the broadcaster-conflict argument that made rights holders refuse to look at fan content at all [3]
• Counting only owned channels understates sponsor exposure badly; including media partners, affiliates, influencers and fans typically produces around 10x the media value for a team, and lower multiples for leagues that already publish heavily [3]
• Real-time data on non-live short form during events, compared against Nielsen live engagement, showed fan content driving viewers toward the broadcast rather than away from it [3]
• Archives carry no broadcaster objection, so AI clipping tools, from companies such as WSC, turn libraries into a new revenue stream on YouTube without disturbing live rights [3]
• Fan creators with existing followings are the highest-quality influencer pipeline available, and opening a creator programme to them globally scales it from twenty people to thousands [3]
• Adoption splits by region and by organisation: the US moves when the revenue case is proven, Europe more slowly, and the deepest deployments spread the data across every business unit, as at the NBA [3]