 |
|
|
Monetizing Context: iCopyright Brings
Contextual Ads to User Content Redistribution |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
13 March 2006 |
|
|
|
|
Content relicensing services provide publishers with steady
if somewhat unglamorous revenues from individuals and
institutions willing to pay a premium for the rights to
redistribute copyrighted content. But what about the untold
millions of individuals who forward content via emails to
people who they know - with nary a bit of revenues going to
publishers? iCopyright has come up with a simple solution
to this long-standing dilemma: make it easy for users to do
this using a version of the content that has contextual ads
embedded. It's remarkable that making money out of content
passed from user to user is still such a new art for most
publishers, but with iCopyright's new program it's an art
that may become rather familiar to them. |
|
Content relicensing has long
been seen by many publishers as nice incremental revenue but
hardly anything to get excited about. This is in some ways
rather ironic given the power of personal publishing that has
made users the primary distributors of much of the world's
intellectual property via emails, reprint services or good old
photocopying. A goodly amount of this content rolls off the
"presses" of institutions keen to toe the line of copyright law
at a reasonable out-of-pocket price. In an era of heightened
corporate compliance awareness content relicensing services
that make it easy for enterprises to respect copyrights do very
well indeed, taking in reliable and fattening revenue streams
in the process for themselves and the publishers that they
serve. Yet most redistribution of copyrighted content via
emails and other personal publishing tools goes unchallenged -
and unmonetized.
But what if instead of viewing redistribution as a source of
incremental revenues through enforced copyright protection
publishers began to think about how content redistribution
could fatten their wallets in a more significant and universal
way? The folks at
iCopyright
have been asking this question and have come up with a fairly
straightforward but powerful answer: add contextual ads to
legally redistributed content and make it free for users to do
so. In cooperation with major online ad networks iCopyright has
added contextual ads for users firing off free versions of
copyrighted content to friends and associates that have
contextual ads embedded in the transmitted version. When the
links for the full piece of content are clicked on, the results
look like
this page. The publishers participating in this program get
a hefty cut of the ad revenues as well as statistics that help
them to gauge the efficiency of their ads via content
redistribution.
The technology and business concept behind iCopyright's new
ad-supported relicensing services is hardly brain surgery, yet
it has stepped into a huge void that both publishers and
content relicensing services have largely ignored or
sidestepped for many years. If you know that users are
redistributing your content like crazy, why not empower them as
distribution agents and use free publishing capabilities to get
your content - and your ads - into the hands of audiences that
are almost certain to consume them?
Mike O'Donnell, the founder and CEO of iCopyright, claims
that the response from publishers to this new initiative has
been remarkably strong. That's not surprising, given its
potential. But what is the full potential for leveraging users
to gain much more powerful contexts for ads and other
monetization services? Here are a few suggestions that you may
want to roll around in your own mind:
- Look at getting content into the hands of your
audience as the beginning of publishing, not the end.
With many media companies and publishers focused on locking
down electronic content redistribution rights via DRM,
traditional relicensing ecommerce and other controls there is
precious little thought given even now to the concept of
individuals as key partners in the publishing process. There
is still an enormous amount of emphasis in publishing as
being the art and science of getting good content created and
distributed by institutions to individuals. Yet the
publishing power of users worldwide totally dwarfs any major
publisher's ability to get content into the rights hands
quickly and effectively. The challenge for publishers is to
create content services and packaging that are prepared to
treat content's journey from its original source to a
first-time user as just the very beginning of its lifecycle
of monetization.
- Look at the context of highly recommended content as
the real gold that can be mined for profits. In addition
to forwarded items getting read with very high frequency they
also carry a high level of endorsement from the person
sending them - a "branding" for content and ads that is
extremely difficult to replicate through traditional
marketing channels. While mass distribution of content via
Web sites, feeds and other electronic channels will reign for
many years as the primary focus of publishers, a substantial
portion of publishing profits are going to move to channels
that are user-activated in one way or another. Web sites such
as Yahoo!'s
del.icio.us, FM Publishing's
Digg and
Newsvine
help users to collaborate on identifying valuable content via
portals, efforts that have gained a great deal of attention
from people seeking out the next big content monetization
opportunity. The endorsement of other trusted individuals is
very valuable in general; having that trust associated with
people who you know personally is higher yet. The
opportunities for these endorsements are fleeting, but the
value that publishers and advertisers can gain from
considering the value of content endorsed on a
person-to-person basis has enormous potential.
- Empower users to help initiate the next stage in its
lifecycle in as many effective ways as possible. The
iCopyright system of ad-supported free redistribution is
powerful, but what if users were empowered to profit from
content redistribution and recontextualization themselves?
Services such as
Weed's
monetization capabilities for shared music downloads have
explored this capability for several years now, but it's an
idea still considered on the fringes of mainstream
publishing. If one individuals' endorsement of content is
more powerful than anothers' then it becomes highly important
to have systems in place that can reward those users as
active participants in a publisher's success. With the
iCopyright ad-supported system of content redistribution the
question of how publishers are going to empower these users
as active agents becomes far less of a fringe issue for
publishers to consider.
Untold sums are being spent to promote Web portal content
that is just what a particular user is looking for. Yet nothing
is more powerful for getting the right content into the right
hands for the right reasons than individuals who have specific
people in mind for a particular piece of content. Publishers
will be wise to look at iCopyright's efforts in putting
contextual ads in legally redistributed content as a very
important step towards establishing user-endorsed content as
one of the most potent untapped gold mines that they can
consider.
-
John Blossom
To top of
page
 |
