The label, “TV Guide for the internet,” doesn’t fully capture the intent or the extent of Clicker. We first wrote about the site when it appeared at the TechCrunch50 event. It was then in a closed beta. However today, a mere 58 days later, the site launches to the public with a number of new features and additional content.

Former Ask CEO Jim Lanzone, now the CEO of Clicker, has described the site as “the first structured, comprehensive and unbiased programming guide for internet television.” And in today’s press release the site calls itself “Complete Programming Guide for Internet Television.”

Clicker may look like a more organized version of YouTube or a broader version of Hulu or a video search engine; and while there have been TV programming guides online, the gestalt of Clicker is something new. It both expresses where video programming is today and anticipates the “converged future.”

Increasingly people are watching movies and TV programs online. According to comScore, “more than 168 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during [September] . . . with nearly 26 billion videos viewed during the month . . .”

Clicker doesn’t compete with any of the video sites or destinations listed above; it aims to sit on top of all this content and serve as a comprehensive guide to them. Clicker also features movies, music video and made-for-Web video. Some of this content can be viewed on Clicker (if the video player is embeddable) but mostly Clicker refers people to the original sources.

Though it may not be entirely obvious, Clicker has a bright social future with a long road map of community features that will be built out over time. Imagine playlists and favorites “curated” by aficionados and experts in genres or sub-genres. And Clicker’s structured data approach provides lots and lots of information about programs and ways into content and related content:

The new features making their appearance with the public launch include:

• More content: 400,000 full episodes from over 1,200 sources in more than 1,200 categories [and] over 30,000 movies from Netflix Instant Streaming and Amazon VOD.  (Clicker also catalogs more than 50,000 music videos from over 20,000 artists.)
• Improved DVR-like Playlist functionality, including new episode alerts and full “season passes”
• Facebook Connect integration, so anyone can create a Clicker account with Facebook and/or tie their Clicker account to their Facebook profile
• User-Generated Content: fans can contribute their own thoughts, observations, and facts about any show or episode
• Search Within: The ability to restrict a search to topics within a specific program. For example, searching “Warren Buffett” within the show Charlie Rose specifically brings up those episodes where Buffett is interviewed
• Related Search: Machine-learning based suggestions on related programs. For example, 30 Rock, The Office and Larry Sanders Show are offered as related suggestions for the show Seinfeld

As mentioned above, Clicker also anticipates the coming era of the internet in the living room (on TV). As mentioned in our original post, Clicker CEO Lanzone told me that almost immediately after the demo he did at the TechCrunch50 event he was getting inquiries from the mainstream broadcasters and cable companies. Below is a “TV interface” that Clicker mocked up that could replace the kludgy cable programming guides of today.

There’s no doubt competitors will come out of the woodwork and existing companies will reposition themselves to match Clicker’s positioning and claims. However Clicker is in a very solid if not unique position to realize its ambition to be a comprehensive programming guide for video and entertainment content whether online — or on TV.

Bing and MSN have combined to create Bing Videos, a new video portal that combines the content from MSN Videos with Bing’s search technology.

According to today’s announcement (and more here), the new site combines videos from a variety of sources. The former MSN Videos offered original programming, as well content from the likes of MSNBC, Fox Sports, National Geographic, and others. Bing Videos will house that content, and offer web-based videos from sites like YouTube, Hulu, MySpace, and others.

Videos are organized into a handful of categories (News, Sports, TV Shows, etc.) and there are sections for “Hot Viral Clips,” “Last Night on TV,” and “Best of Bing” among others.

Overall, it’s a compelling interface with what appears to be a lot of content, and finding exactly the specific type of video you want is painless. It may help Microsoft add to its second-place video market share, but as recent numbers suggest, it has a long, long way to go to even approach YouTube’s dominance.

It may have a search box and look like a video search engine but Clicker is not according to CEO and co-founder Jim Lanzone. In a way this may seem like a strange position to take given that Lanzone was the very partisan CEO of search engine Ask. But while Clicker does index video it primarily relies on structured data to organize and present content. It thus offers a richer and more complete user experience than can a pure video search engine, which is just crawling and relying on metadata. Metaphorically speaking there’s as much Yahoo Directory in here as Google.

Lanzone in his demo at the TechCrunch50 event described Clicker as “the first structured, comprehensive and unbiased programming guide for internet television.” The short version is “TV guide for the web.” People will get that concept immediately but even that doesn’t capture Lanzone’s vision. He explained to me during our call that the site was in many ways more like TripAdvisor or IMDB or (eventually) Wikipedia than it was Truveo or even YouTube. There’s also a little bit of Pandora in there for good measure.

The more I spoke to Lanzone the more impressed I was with his vision and Clicker’s potential.

Content convergence is coming: online video will more and more be watched on TV and TV/films are now heavily watched online. The site already has a deal with Boxee that brings this content to the living room. And Lazone’s vision encompasses more than just video as well.

Clicker is a product that comes at the right time for the market. As evidence, Lanzone told me that almost immediately after the TechCrunch demo he was getting inquiries from the mainstream broadcasters and cable companies.

There’s also a huge community play here too. Eventually Lanzone sees fans and the community “curating” content and building out layers and recommendations that an editorial staff or search engine couldn’t do alone. Each video can be annotated by users, who can add comments, point to related videos and so on. But while there’s going to be community involvement and lots of obscure internet-only content surfaced on Clicker, it won’t have all the self-indulgent amateur content that one finds on YouTube. While some people find that stuff compellling, a minimum of it is truly worthwhile in my view.

While I strongly believe that Clicker will succeed, there is still a challenge in executing against the ambitious vision. To help that big vision along, Lanzone has already raised $8 million.

The ultimate opportunity is that Clicker might become a kind of “front door” to programming consumed online and maybe, eventually, on TV. The online video numbers are getting bigger by the day. So if Clicker can build an audience it can make money off ads. However Lanzone also envisions a “pro” (subscription) version like the IMDB.

I don’t want to be too effusive; success online is never guaranteed. But I was immediately impressed when I saw the demo; and the site reflects lots of careful thinking and hard work so far. Lanzone has also assembled a strong team, many of whom are colleagues from Ask. Finally, I was also impressed with brand and the fact that he managed to get a URL that is an English word and has all its vowels intact.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: I saw Clicker a few months ago and loved the concept. I’d just hunted all over the web to try and locate where an episode of Rescue Me might reside. There are so many places offering TV online, but where to go? The official site? Hulu? I used Clicker just now to find a missing episode of Defying Gravity. I missed the premier, and when I started recording, I was already well into the series. No scrambling around — I got pointed to ABC (Hulu also has it, but as ABC is the source, I guess that’s what gets listed first). Of course, disappointment. The episodes I missed aren’t online any longer. That’s more an issue with the TV networks than Clicker, of course.

Have you ever needed to see the search results for another city — maybe because you want to see what PPC ads are shown somewhere else? Have you ever needed to see search results from a different country, or in a different language? Maybe you’re into real time search, and you’d love a place to find the latest photos and videos being shared on Twitter. Or perhaps you’re planning a vacation abroad, but you’re not sure when is the best time to visit Europe.

It’s time again for another roundup of the latest and greatest search tools and search engines, and in this article, I’ll share five such sites that will answer the above questions (and more). This is the fourth in my occasional series profiling under-the-radar search tools. Links to the previous three are at the end of this article.

SearchMuffin

Look, I don’t name ‘em, I just use ‘em and write about ‘em if they’re cool. And this one is. SearchMuffin has a simple premise: Type in a keyword and choose a city from the dropdown menu, and it’ll show you the Google search results that match. Think of it as a sort of geo-targeted competitive research/PPC research tool. It’s about the easiest way I know of to see the PPC ads that appear in other cities. Here’s a screenshot of a search for “anaheim real estate” in Anaheim, even though I’m up in Washington state.

And best of all, it’s not just limited to major U.S. cities; at the moment, there are 262 choices in the dropdown menu, including such non-metropolises as Roseville, California, and Arvada, Colorado. (No disrespect intended to Rosevillites and Arvadians.)

Glearch

Let’s expand our horizons beyond 262 U.S. cities. What if you needed to quickly see some search results from other countries and/or other languages? Glearch (again, I don’t name ‘em) is an international meta search engine that lets you search by country, by language, and/or by search engine. You can take those three options and customize each to build just the query you want.

In the example above, I’m doing a search for the rock band U2, and I’m searching French-language results on the French versions of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. I’m also including local newspapers, too. The search results page has a tab for web results and a tab for news results. The web results page, like any good meta search site, tells you where each listing was found, i.e., “Ranked 1 by Google search” or “Ranked 4 by Yahoo search.”

Roooby

We’ve written a fair amount about real time search in the past few months, but we haven’t focused too much on the visual element — people posting photos and videos of what they’re doing now. Roooby is one of several real time search engines that capture media, but one of the few that surface both photos and videos. (Although, to be frank, Roooby could do a better job of finding videos by scanning sites such as Qik.com, TwitVid.io, and others that host live video.)

Roooby isn’t the only player in this space. TwitCaps, TwitPicGrid, Pingwire, and Twicsy offer similar real time image search engines.

Spezify

Speaking of media and images, here’s the most visual search tool I’ve ever seen: Spezify. The best way I can describe it is a sort of visual meta search engine. It pulls in results from Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and even eBay and Amazon to create a fairly stunning search results page.

This is serious eye candy. There’s a settings page where you can choose the sources and types of content (images, text, video) you want included. But to be frank, the focus on visuals means the search results have no context whatsoever. You can move vertically and horizontally through the results, but you have no idea why you’re seeing what you’re seeing. It’s innovative to be sure, but for this searcher, it’s too lacking in functionality.

Joobili

Finally, here’s one for our readers in Europe, or for our readers traveling to Europe. It’s called Joobili, and it’s a travel/event search engine with a twist: Rather than telling the search engine what you want to do or where you want to go, you tell it when. There’s a cool date-based slider on the home page to get you started, and once you’re in the results, Joobili lets you see results based on categories (Arts, Sport, Nature, etc.), by country, or by keyword.

If you create an account, Joobili will let you save events to a wish list or a “went” list. You can also rank events to help other users make decisions on what to do and where to go. It’s a clever approach, but as I hinted above, it only covers Europe.

See also:

• Another 5 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 5 (More) Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

According to comScore the average watcher of online video in the US took in 385 minutes-worth in April. And according to Nielsen, in May, “year-over-year, unique viewers, total streams, streams per viewer and time per viewer were up, led by a 49 percent growth in time per viewer.” The leading video site is Google/YouTube by a large margin with almost double the unique users of Fox Interactive Media, the next ranking US online video provider. After that it becomes much more competitive.

Against that backdrop of intense competition and increasing consumer demand for online video, AOL’s video search engine Truveo has relaunched on a global basis (17 countries).

Truveo began as a video search technology platform and was acquired by AOL in January, 2006. In August of 2007 it became a consumer destination site. The previous version of the site had a number of virtues (depth, global scope, organization) but also serious problems with usability. I wrote at the time:

The single biggest drawback to the site (esp. vs. YouTube) is the fact that many (though not all) of Truveo’s content partners contractually require that videos be served on their sites rather than on Truveo. Consequently a pop-up appears and you watch the desired video (and pre-rolls ads) on the partner sites (about 50% of the time in my quick testing). That creates a variable experience, which YouTube avoids by having everything play in a single, uniform player on its site.

Those problems have largely remedied with the new user experience though there’s still some unevenness. Yet one can watch many more videos on the Truveo site itself today; and where the engine is compelled to link to third party sites (i.e., no video embed code) Truveo frames the experience. Here are two viewing modes:

Among the improvements, there are also new user controls and filters to search or browse video by source or sort by popularity, ranking and recency:

There are also myriad full-length shows on the site. Overall this is a dramatically improved user experience and Truveo should see its traffic increase accordingly.

Truveo itself says that its global reach and the comprehensiveness of its video index — all the video is being crawled, there are no feeds or deals here — are what differentiate the site from competitors. AOL video remains a separate site with a different look and feel, though they share technology.

As part of the announcement this morning Truveo announced a deal to power video search on Univision Interactive Media’s online portal.

In the world of competition between and among websites, search engines and online publishers there is also the “behind the scenes” competition between Nielsen and comScore. Both want to be the source of record for traffic data and both are occasionally the subject of controversy.

There was the incident early in 2008 where comScore put out a report that Google’s paid clicks were down, sending Google shares down. But when Google announced a very strong Q1, comScore shares then took a hit and the company had to go into damage control mode. More recently Nielsen reported that despite Twitter’s massive growth it was only “retaining” 40% of users. There was an immediate and vocal backlash, putting Nielsen on the defensive. However the company stood by its numbers after a second look.

Despite outward confidence and appearances of objectivity, these measurement services are subject to human error (interpreting the data) and occasionally just screw up. However, advertisers, banks, the press and others with an interest in tracking uniques and traffic growth don’t trust the numbers put out by the publishers themselves. So third party measurement and validation is a high stakes game.

The newest metrics controversy, this time pitting comScore against Nielsen, involves Hulu. As the New York Times reports, comScore recently reported almost 42 million unique visitors for Hulu compared with only 8.9 million according to Nielsen. However both data providers show high percentage growth at Hulu. But Hulu was frustrated and upset with the Nielsen figures that show unique visitors declining from March to April.

Quantcast and Compete, imperfect and in disagreement themselves, show Hulu’s numbers closer to those put out by Nielsen than comScore’s estimates:

Google Trends data sits between the Nielsen and comScore numbers:

The obvious conclusion is that one has to look broadly at all the numbers and use the consensus and directional trends. This is something of a mantra for Danny in reviewing the search market share data.

I’ve asked Hitwise to weigh in and will update this story if they do.

Searchme has rolled out what it calls “true” blended search results, combining web, video, images, music and Twitter results organized by their relevance and playable inside the search results page. Searchme displays results as small versions of entire web pages, in a format that looks just like the “cover flow” display in iTunes.

I love Searchme as a “recall engine,” using it to find web pages or sites that I’ve previously visited but can’t remember the site name or URL. The visual display of results, with the ability to quickly scroll through mini-versions of pages makes it easy to recognize sites that I’ve already seen.

I also love Searchme’s music search capabilities. Through an arrangement with iMeem, you can play entire songs, directly from the music search result page. It’s a great way to decide whether you want to buy a song from iTunes or Amazon (both of which only let you hear 30 second snippets of songs).

Searchme also offers a sort of “visual bookmarks” feature called “stacks” that let you save pointers to content you want to revisit.

Searchme likely won’t replace your regular search engine, but it offers enough really cool and useful features that you’ll want to add it to your web search arsenal.

As has anyone in the online industry, I have closely followed the YouTube saga since its acquisition by Google.  Undoubtedly YouTube is one of the greatest success stories of the Internet era, adding users and usage faster than any site ever launched on the web, including MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Google.  What is also often missed is that YouTube is the third largest search site on the Web in terms of query volume, behind only Google and Yahoo.  Despite these impressive metrics, YouTube has failed to deliver meaningful revenue and loses approximately $1MM/day due to its huge bandwidth costs.

YouTube’s more recent strategy has been to pursue premium content as a means to generate revenue.  All video metrics point to the reality that premium content and professional content is the only real moneymaking video opportunity on the web, as Hulu has demonstrated most recently.  YouTube’s original premium content strategy was to approach major broadcasters and extol the virtues of its huge audience combined with the Google advertising prowess.  The pitch was essentially “give us all your content and we will send you a big check each month.”  The problem was that major media companies had already witnessed the loss of channel power from Google web search, and sat by frustrated while Google made billions from its content aggregation model in the form of Google web search.  These lessons wouldn’t be forgotten and Google’s pitch fell on deaf ears.

YouTube has had recent success signing premium content providers, most significantly Disney, but with three huge concessions to its previous business model: 1) Disney, and more specifically ESPN, will be allowed to monetize its content being viewed on YouTube;  2) ESPN will be allowed to embed its own video player on YouTube; and 3) Disney will be given a branded “walled-garden” to display its content within YouTube.  This deal solves the three key concerns media companies have about working with YouTube. 

Media companies are in business to sell advertising, and their trusted brands can deliver the dollars.  Second, they care deeply about their brands, and the ability to control the look and feel of the player, as well as protecting the brand from unfiltered user-generated content is a critical requirement that has historically kept most brands off of YouTube.  On the surface this seems like a win for YouTube, but I would argue it’s the first crack in the strategy that has made YouTube so successful, and that is the ubiquity of its brand and the ubiquity of its user experience.  A few months ago I argued that user-generated video is like instant messaging in that everyone uses it and no one makes money on it.  How then can YouTube find a business model?

Clayton Christensen, the noted Harvard Business School strategy professor, wrote the seminal work on the disruption of the incumbent’s business model called “The Innovators Dilemma.”  Essentially the book outlines the challenges a company faces when a young upstart creates a disruptive new business model.  Ironically, despite its own young age, in this case YouTube faces disruption from Hulu.  In just a short time, Hulu has executed brilliantly on its premium long-form content strategy and delivered early success for its owners.  Amazingly, it has YouTube turning itself inside-out to figure out how to compete.  This is precisely the wrong tactic for YouTube to take.  History has shown again and again that companies cannot fundamentally redefine themselves in order to respond to a competitive threat.   Everything that has made YouTube successful will work against it in trying to compete head on with Hulu.

Instead, YouTube must exploit its assets to build a sustainable business compatible with its original strategy.  In YouTube’s case, their most valuable asset by far is their search volume.  However, what continues to amaze me is that despite having the most talented search technologists on the planet, YouTube’s search and related content algorithms are shockingly poor.  With that as context, here is my prescription for YouTube to finding its own financial success.

What Google needs to do to fix YouTube

Fix the search algorithm. I  mean really? Really?  Have you really looked at YouTube’s or Google Video’s search results recently?  Can anyone in the search industry unpack their algorithm for me?  I’ve been in the search business for over a decade and I cannot figure out what they are ranking on, and certainly can’t imagine they look at these results and feel good about them.  Part of the challenge here is that videos are fundamentally different than text documents.  First, there is a paucity of content to index.  Most videos have just a generic title and description and some user generated tags.  I can tell you that we have looked at the user tags of over 2 million YouTube videos, and the same spamming problems that exist on the Web exist within YouTube. 

What’s needed is a more robust approach to creating high quality metadata for proper indexing.  Second, a better popularity and quality score needs to be integrated, because videos are also lacking the link data that made PageRank so successful for ranking web documents.  Also, how about some search syntax specific to video.  It would be very useful to have operators similar to what exists on Google web search.  For example, a syntax such as “title:keyword” for searching just within the title or “transcript:keyword” for searching just within the transcript or “source:SampleSource keyword” for searching within a certain source like FoxNews etc.

Merge the Google video search into the YouTube search box. When’s the last time you used Google Video search?  Its not even available from the home page of Google, and represents one of the strangest user experiences in all of search.  The page layout is impossible to decipher, and it seems unable to decide what master its serving.  Is it driving traffic to YouTube?  Sometimes—although via an embedded YouTube player.  Is it the world’s biggest video index of the Web?  Not even close, when compared to Blinkx or Truveo.  I have no idea what this product is trying to be.

Make YouTube the web’s video search engine. As I asserted above, user generated content will never produce significant revenue for YouTube.  By its very nature it is virtually impossible to monetize directly.  However, it is one of the Web’s most valuable loss-leaders.  This content has enabled YouTube to become the web’s 3rd biggest search engine, and its time to exploit that asset.  To do this, YouTube needs to build a content submission API that gives content owners the option to submit the entire video or just a deep link to a video on the content owner’s website.  It needs to include a comprehensive set of all possible metadata to finally give YouTube the raw material it needs to build a proper search algorithm.  Then its needs to redesign its search results page to help the user decide what kind of content they wish to view, be it UGC on YouTube, premium content on YouTube, or links to content off YouTube.

Create a business model that works. To me, this answer has always seemed obvious in that there is a perfect precedent for premium content publishers.  For decades, premium content television producers have paid cable operators huge fees to carry their channels.  Why do they do this?  To create the consumption they need to have an advertising business model, they need to have audience.  Carriage fees gives them a predictable audience they can monetize.  Merging this model with YouTube’s search asset is the path to YouTube revenue. 

If I were YouTube, I would deploy a two-part business model.  Premium publishers would purchase shelf space each month depending on the number of clips submitted for indexing.  This shelf space would buy them a set number of “clicks” on their content, and those clicks could either resolve to content uploaded to YouTube or back to the publisher’s own web site.  In addition, publishers would be allowed to “bid” for clicks in excess of their included amount to drive additional views.  Obviously the CPC on YouTube would be a fraction of what it is on web search (remember—a $.10 CPC is equivalent to a $100 CPM).  This means that average CPCs would probably hover around a penny or two, creating the need to allow for tenths of a cent bidding increments.  As ad dollars continue to flow online, publishers will be in a position to pay more over time.  In the short term, the carriage fees allows them to build a more predictable audience and for YouTube to build a recurring revenue model.

YouTube’s current gyrations chasing Hulu are the best thing to happen to Hulu.  Hulu’s DNA is about premium long form content.  Everything they do is geared towards this mission, and they do it extremely well.  Nothing in YouTube’s DNA gives them any advantage for this market.  YouTube needs to exploit its core assets and advantages to find its own business model.

Google remains the dominant player in the online video space, but Hulu is on the rise. It’s now the number three video property according to the latest comScore numbers out today.

According to comScore, Hulu has passed Yahoo properties and moved into the third spot with 2.6% of all videos viewed during March. Yahoo dropped to fourth with 2.3 million videos watched on its sites. Google properties (primarily YouTube) are still miles ahead of the competition with almost 41% of all videos viewed during the month.

ComScore estimates that almost 150 million Internet users watched an average of 97 videos during March, totaling almost 5.5 hours per person. The average Google/YouTube viewer watched 59 videos.

YouTube spawned Hulu and Hulu is having a big influence on the future of YouTube. Hulu has had great success with brand advertisers, while YouTube has struggled to sell itself to brands despite being the dominant video site online (see chart below). Accordingly, last month ClickZ reported that YouTube was getting a Hulu-like makeover that would better showcase some of the professionally produced TV and film content YouTube has been working to acquire:

The new design will offer four tabs: Movies, Music, Shows, and Videos. The first three tabs will display premium shows, clips, and movies from Google’s network and studio partners, all of which will be monetized with in-stream advertising. Meanwhile the Videos channel will house amateur and semi-pro content of the sort major brand advertisers have shied away from.

YouTube has also been doing lots of creative things to generate more revenue and live up to expectations in that arena. Among them, expanding the novel “click to buy” program and adopting a version of paid search (”sponsored videos“) for the site. But many financial analysts consider YouTube a disappointment from a revenue standpoint:

Credit Suisse estimates YouTube will manage to rake in about $240 million in ad revenue in 2009, against operating costs of roughly $711 million, leading to a shortfall of just over $470 million. This half-billion dollar loss comes after more than a year of feverish experimentation in various forms of advertising, cross-product embedding, licensing and partnership deals. YouTube is adamant that ultimately they’ll find an advertising solution that will enable the ungainly behemoth to reach profitability. Looking at the math, it doesn’t seem likely.

Against this backdrop comes the redesign and stepped up deals for more professional content to make YouTube “safer” for brand advertisers. YouTube is reportedly in talks with Sony Pictures to include feature films on the site. It already has a limited deal with MGM. More interesting than that is the new joint venture with Universal Music called Vevo, which aspires to be the “Hulu of music video.” According to the NY Times:

Music videos of Universal’s artists will be available both on Vevo.com, which will be powered by YouTube’s technology, and on a Vevo channel on YouTube. The companies said they would share revenue from advertising on both sites, but declined to discuss specific terms of the agreement.

Vevo is being set up as a separate company that is owned by Google and Universal, according to a person familiar with the agreement who requested anonymity because he was not allowed to discuss its terms publicly.

Google and Universal said they planned to introduce Vevo this year. They said they were working to persuade other major labels to join the site.

There will be direct sales of music and, presumably, advertising on Vevo that will be shared by Universal, Google and anyone else who joins. But what’s most interesting to me is the fact that YouTube is the “white label” infrastructure provider in the deal. (YouTube will also get the content.) Advertisers will undoubtedly like Vevo, as they have taken to Hulu.

YouTube is the dominant video destination online:

Source: comScore

Finally, in a related item that has echos of newspaper complaints against Google, successful songwriter Pete Waterman says that he’s been “exploited” by YouTube:

The 62-year-old said the Rick Astley classic Never Gonna Give You Up, which he co-wrote and which was the subject of a YouTube craze last year, had earned him just £11 from Google, despite being viewed 154 million times.

Waterman, whose fortune was estimated at £47 million by The Times in 2004, compared this treatment to the “exploitation” of migrant workers in the Middle East.

Pete probably needs to take that complaint up with the music label — in this case Sony.