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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS

How Much Is That License in the Window?
Friday, February 5, 2010

As publishers scramble for new revenue sources, some companies are turning inward to see how decades of archived media assets can be combined with e-commerce engines to create content licensing portals. SPIN magazine, for instance, launched a site last month where other publishers could access 25 years of images under a range of fees and usage parameters. A reuse of a recent Lady Gaga image as a magazine cover will run you $2,035. At Life.com, the newly opened home to the legendary magazine brand is both a content destination for consumers and a licensing engine for the company. Every image on the site can link through to a set of tools at Getty Images for gaining usage rights.

But how much can publishing companies earn by opening up a b2b storefront for other content providers, advertisers and enterprises to use? Iain Scholnick, CEO of ImageSpan, says that the scale of the catalog has a lot to do with the revenue it can render. His company’s LicenseStream licensing product is a back end that powers the SPIN magazine site as well as others from Chicago Tribune. “We typically get 3% of a customer’s database moving into transactions,” he tells minonline. “The average price point per piece of content can range from $50 to $300.” The ImageSpan cut ranges between 10% and 25%. “Depending on the size of a customer’s database, the net result is hundreds of thousands in revenue going through the system over a transactional year.”

One of the advantages of licensing content over the Internet is that the publisher’s wares can become part of the multimedia ecosystem that is driven by social sharing and search. Except for Life.com, which leverages a consumer destination as a licensing catalog, licensing stores generally rely primarily on making the content discoverable through the usual search channels.

Rather than trying to attract the right b2b audience to a licensing hub, “we make content itself the storefront,” says Scholnick. “The media moves across the Web with defined ownership, rights and restrictions, enabling flexible pricing based on use. This shortens the throw between search, discovery and payment. Someone can find an image anywhere on the Web, click on it and be taken to a licensing page or directed back to the content owner’s Web site.”

Who is buying via Web-based licensing? In these early stages of the practice, it seems to be coming from advertisers, marketers and publishers looking for content for commercial uses. According to Scholnick, the most popular content categories so far have been sports, history and fashion, both still images and video.

Nominations are being accepted for min's In-Box Awards, which will honor achievements in email publishing. Winners will be announced at min’s "How-To" Email Marketing and Monetization Conference on April 29 in New York.

If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com

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