World Star Hip Hop is the best site evar, because it hosts hardly anything other than videos of people making asses of themselves, and hip-hop-related pr0n. Should we give a shit that they aren't technically allowed to post the vast majority of the videos on their site? I'm gonna go ahead and suggest that we shouldn't, though I'm sure many will beg to differ.

Take for example eskay, proprietor of the venerable Nah Right. Here's his response yesterday, in our Hip-Hop Ads email group (note that while this is a private group, the archives of our discussions are public and accessible to anyone on the Internets), to the news that "worldstarhiphop" was the 15th highest rising search term on Google yesterday, and that the name of the site has been one of the highest rising search terms of the past year, related to hip-hop.

I hope those slimy scumbags get shut down tomorrow.

Roffle.

Slimy scumbags, eh? I was surprised to see that response from eskay, of all people, who's made his bones on the Internets posting mp3s of songs he may or may not have had the permission to post. We know that, on a number of occasions, he definitely hasn't, since Atlantic Records has hit him with the ol' cease and decist, then he tried to turn it into a matter of him trying to help promote the new T.I. album, as if "Whatever You Like" wouldn't have been on the radio ad nauseum this year, if it wasn't for him.

Keep in mind, I don't find eskay to be a scumbag, or any of the other names Brandon Soderberg probably calls him when he's at home talking to his girlfriend about Nah Right. I find Nah Right to be an invaluable resource for keeping up with the careers of guys like Skyzoo. I'm just saying. The entire blogosphere is made up of people capitalizing on other people's intellectual property without adding much, if anything in the way of added value. Why single out World Star Hip Hop?

It could be that eskay has had some bad dealings behind the scenes with the guys with the guys from World Star that we haven't been privy to. But obviously we don't have any way of knowing. On my own site, I've been trying to expose more and more of the soft white underbelly of the hip-hop media, both for my own personal amusement, and so we can get a better idea of just how this shit works.

So there's that. Then there's the whole business aspect of it. Our hip-hop ads group, after all, is a group that discusses how to make money in hip-hop through advertising. (I'm mostly in it to bask in the utter cynicism, and to fuck with people.) If World Star Hip Hop is quickly becoming the place to go for hip-hop video, like a hip-hop YouTube, does that mean it's eventually gonna be worth like a billion dollars, like the real YouTube?

The consensus in our group was that it probably won't - the problem being that a) they don't for real have the rights to most of the shit they post, so they might not be able to sell ads against it; and b) they post a lot of material of an explicit nature, and company's don't like their ads to be seen alongside shit like that. The pr0n industry, for example, supposedly rivals Hollywood, but you don't see very much product placement in it. (It's one of the reasons why I love it.) Even HBO, you have to subscribe to.

That being said, it's not like most of the people in our group are experts - except for the ones who are. What do you fruits think? Should I take some of this $300 I just got from XXL and cop some shares in World Star? Or should I stockpile some booze, so I function, in case I'm broke for another extended period of time? Also, is it really such a big deal that World Star sorta kinda profits from other people's intellectual property? Speak on it.

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