HDTV pioneer and Dallas Maverick owner Mark Cuban thinks it’s time for media companies to start filling YouTube with spam.

Cuban highlights the fact that YouTube may have received as much traffic from people viewing Oscar clips as Oscar.com, and asks “Do the Oscars benefit or are they harmed by their video being seen on Youtube.com rather than Oscars.com?”

“The last thing you ever want is for another entity, that is completely out of your control, becoming the defacto manager of your brand,” argues Cuban.

Cuban makes a good case for content owners wanting to control their content, but his suggested solution is counterproductive, at best.

He argues that content owners should invest in spamming YouTube with incomplete versions of their videos, and use these videos to promote the company’s own site:

To capture Youtube viewers, the first step would be to OVERWHELM Youtube with partial clips of full length that tease Youtube users and point them to Oscars.com. For this Will Ferrell clip, I would have created a video that showed the first 10 secs of the clip, then had 4 minutes of a billboard that said ” Great videos from the Oscars telecast and exclusive behind the scenes videos are all available at Oscars.com”

IN addition to the billboard in the video you would have an active link to Oscars.com on the Youtube video page. I wouldnt post this video 1 time. I would post this video 100 times.

And i would do the same thing for EVERY moment and segment in the Oscars.

Cuban’s recommendation fails to take into account two things:

• the way social networking sites work; and
• spam + advertising = brand suicide.

YouTube is a social networking site – so a few people can quickly relegate a post to obscurity, but a lot of people with positive feedback are needed for a post to really get noticed. If the Oscars, or anybody else, systematically spams the site with partial videos and teasers, the videos will be quickly forgotten, even while unauthorized complete versions of the videos get hundreds of thousands of views.

For Cuban’s plan to have any hope of working, you’d need to have a huge, networked array of trained monkeys giving the spam videos positive ratings.

The second, more significant issue, is that people really hate intrusive advertising, and they hate spam even more. Investing in spamming video sites with ads will anger people that might otherwise be interested in you content, and send them looking for an alternate way to get what they want.

Unfortunately, it looks like content owners are going to be protecting their content the old-fashioned way – suing – and there’s going to be a lot of collateral damage.