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What are some of the goals and benefits of Content Licensing?
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Content Licensing Goal #1 – Building Your Traffic: Many content licensing deals come with perks. For instance, when looking to license content, you should make a stipulation in the licensing agreement that requires a link back to your website. Doing so will direct viewers back to your own website for the remainder of the article, or for other related articles.
Content Licensing Goal #2 – Building Your Brand: The more locations you license your content, the better brand recognition you will receive.
Content licensing opportunities will increase the circulation numbers that see your content. Even if the publications you are licensing to are small, a few hundred more free subscribers to your content can yield more paying customers.
Content Licensing Goal #3 – Building Your Revenue: Licensing opportunities can put you in the position to develop a new product line and revenue stream for your content.
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What is the percentage of hard copy packaging, for example printed paper, loose-leaf, etc. versus pure digital electronic in a product line?
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For a business to consumer company, it may be around sixty percent paper. It really depends on your consumer demographics. If you have a somewhat older demographic then you will probably have more paper than digital. Your licensing product line is 99 and a half-percent digital. There is very little licensing or content syndication will end up on paper.
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How did you develop best practices for pricing for licensing your content? Is there one rate card across all types of clients or do you price differently in different markets?
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There is not one rate card. The pricing is very much driven and it’s obviously dependent on your take on the market but it’s very much driven by who has access to a website and what the traffic numbers are. So if it’s an open portal, how much traffic they’re getting and, typically, you will have clauses in there that if they’re getting 100,000 visitors a month now and they go up to 500,000 visitors there’s an escalator clause in the contract. Certainly that’s true of any kind of startup, and you should be fairly weary of being involved with a lot of startups, or anything where you expect the traffic to be changing over time.
For example, if an employer were to license content for its employees, your price might based on the number of employees that would have access, so the pricing model varies depending on the situation. If an insurance company wanted to license content and make it available to all of its insured patients across multiple employers and different geographic locations, you might work out some per individual price or something. So there are general guidelines but how they get applied very much depends on who the client is and what sort of key metrics are relevant for that situation.
Always try be conscious of both kinds of a marketplace value, that seems to be what people will stand and then keeping a very careful eye, having started on the media side, of exactly what that traffic might be worth or is worth.
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Do you actually get involved on the design and how the content is being presented on the other publisher’s site or is there anything from you having to approve what they’re doing or do you help them implement how the content is going to get displayed?
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We don’t get involved in the design, per se, we’re not a design consultant for them. But we do get involved in approving how they’re displaying this content. We want to see if they’ve got any advertising on the site. We want to see what kind of adjacencies they’ve got, whether it’s advertising or just other brands or whatever. We’re certainly sensitive to, and would suggest that everybody should be sensitive to, know how is your content being presented and who else is in the neighborhood that you’re in.
So we do that typically, that’s up front. We also want to make sure all of our content has disclaimers. How is our brand being presented in the context of our content and the site as a whole? Are they making it look as if we are providing all the content for this site or are they making it clear, these articles are coming from us?
So we absolutely do get involved with working with our clients initially. Once we develop a level of trust and understanding then that’s fine, once things get a little more streamlined but early on we absolutely need to be aware of that and work closely with them.
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Do you find that the licensees or the licensors are concerned about the tagging and it is primarily in terms of, if the answer is yes, how they’re going to use it to deploy the content on their site or that they’re actually valuing your content because it’s been search engine optimized?
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Yes. As far as the first part, about their concern about the tagging. And I’ve jumped ahead here to show the different sectors of our distribution. As you can see, the first column is media companies. The second column is health sites, many of the same folks that Harvard partners with. In our world, being food, the grocery retail world has become very important and also food company brands and also food board brands.
So to answer your question, absolutely.
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Explain what the difference is between direct partner and syndication?
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Some good examples are in the health world. There are many kinds of companies in the health world: health care providers, health insurance, hospitals and so on, it is such a large world. There are many vendors out there who specialize in a particular thing, for example, health coaching. They have a whole health coaching infrastructure with telephone, PDFs and online portals that they re-skin and then they go out to, for example, the insurance companies with a particular piece. Since the big insurance companies want to be very integrated, they want to deal with as few vendors as possible, so they often will work with these specialty vendors and that is an example of syndication.
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What types of agencies do you work with to sell your content and where might you find one?
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Some of the best examples perhaps are in the health world. There are agencies, particularly for the pharmacy world. A lot of them are in New Jersey that specializes in servicing the pharmaceutical world. And these days some of them are increasingly focusing on the digital kinds of delivery to the consumer. It’s less expensive and you can be more targeted. There are some challenges in that world because of the very high level of regulation but pharmacies are very large companies and so agencies can be a shortcut in terms of intermediary because they’re working on particular projects. They’re the ones already out there selling the work and the projects and they need good content to be part of that project.
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How similar or different is the content you license versus the content that you sell? How much is unique? How much is repurposed from paid content?
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The majority of it is repurposed, there are three sorts of categories of content. There’s repurposed content from existing paid content products. There is content that is created just for licensing, but that becomes a product that can be resold multiple times.
For instance, interactive tools, in most cases, are being developed just to be licensed, they’re not being repurposed from another product. And then there’s probably a good half of the content that is being repurposed from existing paid content products. Maybe a third of the content are tools that are created specifically for licensing or video that’s created specifically for licensing and made available to a number of clients.
Less than 10-percent of the licensed content is created explicitly for a specific client, even if it is subsequently used in other cases – we certainly do that but we don’t do it a lot.
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