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iCopyright's Advertiser-Supported Free Uses
What they mean to users, publishers, and advertisers
By MIKE O'DONNELL, Founder & CEO, iCopyright
March 15, 2006
My last article, Email this | Print this | Steal this, made the case for advertiser-supported free uses, or free copyright permissions. That article explains how publishers can directly monetize their content when users pass it along to others using the iCopyright links. Advertisers are dedicating significant ad dollars to contextual content buys, believing they are getting a good return on their investment. What does this model mean to users, advertisers and publishers?
What They Mean To Users
Users have become so conditioned to using the "free" email-a-friend and printer-friendly version links that there is no going back. Human nature and the culture of the web have conspired to make traditional copyright protections impractical, if not impossible. Quick-and-free will win out over slow-and-pay every time. That is why users choose the free use links instead of the publisher's reprint and copyright licensing links.
Outsell Inc. recently released a terrific report called "The Global Copyright Pandemic: A First-Aid Kit For Publishers And Information Providers." This report offers eye-opening insights into human behavior on the Internet. According to their report, eighty-nine percent of information users (some 29 million people in the U.S. alone) forward content to others on a daily basis - primarily by e-mail. They don't think about copyright issues. Most people think it is permissible. Those who know better don't care. Most disturbing is that this "sharing" of content is predominantly done for commercial purposes. People email, print and excerpt the content to get their jobs done. And they do it with impunity.
I admit to doing this myself on a regular basis. Naturally, I use the publisher's 'Email-a-Friend' link. That makes it okay, right? Interestingly enough, if you check the free use forms provided by most publishers, they don't restrict the number of emails or copies, nor do they publish any terms of use. I do what most people do. I email the article to myself, then use my group lists in Outlook to distribute the article to as many people as I want.
Using the iCopyright tag (like the one at the top and bottom of this article), I can still email and print the publisher's content for free, but with three very important distinctions:
First, I see that the publisher may limit the number of emails or copies I can do for free, and that the publisher requires me to accept its terms of use. This distinction communicates the publisher's rights and reminds me that the content is protected by copyright. It also tells me that my free use comes with certain conditions. For example, if I strip the iCopyright tag or the publisher's brand out of the material, or cut and paste it without using the form provided by the publisher, my infringement can be discovered and my company can be held liable.
Note: How my willful or unintentional infringement might be discovered and prosecuted will be the subject of another article. For a hint, see the press release announcing the partnership between iCopyright and the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA).
Second, I notice that contextual advertisements are inserted into the article that I emailed or printed for free. These ads are relevant to the subject matter of the article. The ads permit me, and the people to whom I forward the article, to click on interesting ads. I also find that I can "save" the article to my personal reading room. Most publishers did not offer me this feature in the past and those that did used an unintuitive and restrictive implementation that was not all that useful to me.
Third, I am given the opportunity to buy reprints and other types of licenses if I need to email more people or make more copies than that allowed for free by the publisher. I am reminded this is copyrighted content and I begin to understand that I can make customizations and get the content without the ads, if that is important to me or to my job. The iCopyright system provides a way for my company to pay for these uses so I don't have to. I am invited to subscribe to the publication and I am only one click away from the publisher's web site to find additional content that I need.
From a user perspective, these distinctions seem to be a reasonable compromise. They aren't bumps on the information super highway. They don't slow me down or make me stop to pay tolls. They do, however, remind me that the content belongs to someone and that the owner needs to make money on my use of their content so that they can provide me with more of it.
In Summary:
- Users can email, print and save the content for free.
- Users acknowledge the publisher's terms of use when getting the content for free.
- The content is emailed, printed and saved with contextual advertisements that benefit the user and those that get the content from the user, by offering relevant information, products and services.
- The "Save" feature provides a platform for future (next version) enhancements and benefits not provided to users before now. For example, users can be notified when the content is updated and can find similar articles to the ones they have saved.
- Users are invited to buy custom reprints, reproduction rights and digital licenses to use the content without advertisements.
- Users and their employers avoid the risks and penalties of copyright infringement.
What They Mean To Advertisers
As covered in the last article, advertisers are motivated to reach a highly qualified audience for their products and services. Advertising on search engines and web pages provides advertisers with measurable, pay-for-performance, placements. Every report that I have read shows advertiser budgets for web and other digital mediums are increasing steadily. These mediums are attracting advertisers of all sizes and ilk's. Most advertisers - not just the big ones - are flocking to the web. Experts call this "The Long Tail," which means that the vast majority of money comes from a long list of small advertisers. Millions of small advertisers are using ad networks like Google, Yahoo, MIVA, Industry Brains, and dozens of other niche players, to buy campaigns of $50 to $100 per week. Larger companies, of course, spend much more.
What is driving this phenomenon? Results. Advertisers can buy certain keywords and placements on pages that reach their target markets. They get daily reports. They can see the number of clicks. They can track the traffic to their web sites. In the case of MIVA's new pay-per-call ad service, advertisers know exactly how many phone calls their ads generated. Nothing succeeds in business like measurable results.
How will advertisers respond to the opportunity to place their ads inside of articles that users are passing along to others via email, saving in their personal reading rooms or printing for distribution to others? Our early indications are good, but anecdotal. This kind of placement has never been offered to them before in the way in which iCopyright's system parses it and delivers it.
In talking with many types and sizes of advertisers over the last few months, I have come to believe that many of them will want these placements. One advertiser told me, "The best advertising I can get is a customer referral. This sounds like the next best thing. If I know that my ad will appear on a story that is being referred from one person to another, and my ad is relevant to the story or to the interests of the recipient, well hell, that's the holy grail!" Needless to say, his enthusiasm encouraged us.
Several advertisers told me that they would pay a premium for these types of placements. Rather than paying an average of $0.50 per click, some said they would pay $2 or more per click, depending upon the publication and the subject of the article. The market will set the price based on supply and demand. There are only so many placements available in an article from Business Week online that a CEO is emailing to his employees. Who will sell these ads and how will they be priced? How much could publishers make? Stay tuned for my next article, "Advertising-Supported Free Uses: How They Work And Why iCopyright Is The Publisher's Best Partner To Support This Model."
In Summary:
- Advertisers can reach a highly qualified, highly targeted audience.
- Advertisements have a better chance of being seen and acted upon because they are attached to content that is being referred from one person to another person, or from one person to many people.
- Advertisers are no longer limited to keyword searches or placements on web pages that may not be seen by the advertiser's target audience, or relevant to the advertiser's message.
- Advertisers get immediate reports that show clicks, calls and traffic generated from their ad placements.
- Advertisers can request placement within all relevant articles on the network or just those published by specific publications.
- Advertisers bid on placements within available articles and can spend as much or as little as their budgets permit.
What They Mean To Publishers
iCopyright's advertising supported free uses – Email|Print|Save – provides publishers with a new source of advertising revenue. They preserve and extend the publisher's brands and copyrights. They cross sell and upsell reprints, republication rights and other fee-based permissions. They increase circulation by encouraging users to pass the content on to others - one-to-one and one-to-many. The tag that is affixed to these free uses "calls home" on a regular basis, providing publishers with valuable data on reader usage. The tag also provides links back to the publisher's web site, which attracts readers and subscribers that the publisher may not have attracted otherwise.
Publishers don't have to provide the "e-mail-a-friend" and "printer-friendly version" links and some don't. I think this is short-sighted. Human behavior being what it is, many users will simply cut-and-paste the article into an email or into their word processing program. At that point, publishers have lost all control over their content. Publishers might as well provide these free use links on every article they publish, so that they can capitalize on the reader's predisposition to forward and copy the articles whether there are free use links on them or not. By doing so, they also preserve the connection between the content and their brand.
The "lock-it-down" Digital Rights Management (DRM) hawks will read this and scream, "But we can protect the publisher's content!" Content does not need to be protected. It needs to be sold. I have never met a DRM scheme that worked so well that I could not easily work around it if I wanted to. This is especially true for news and information content. An information user intent on copying and redistributing the content can do so in minutes, if not seconds. Three keys on the user's keyboard will do the trick, Ctrl-Alt-PrintScrn. Using the mouse to click File-Print works well too. If DRM technologies are smart enough to disable these features (most aren't), determined users can take a picture of the screen with a digital camera, then copy the image to their computers. If they need the article in text form, no problem, the OCR program that comes bundled with most digital cameras can convert the image to text in about 30 seconds.
In Summary:
- Publishers (and the iCopyright system) can limit the number of emails, the number of copies and the amount of time a user can save the content.
- Publishers get a new source of revenue - a new way to monetize their content.
- Publishers could get a premium from advertisers by giving them the ability to place ads within the content their users are sharing with others.
- Publishers can integrate free uses with traditional reprint and permissions, to cross-sell and upsell users to ad-free uses of their content.
- Publishers get users to increase their circulation and promote their brands.
- Publishers preserve their copyrights and make users more aware about the publisher's rights in the content.
- Publishers could get more traffic, more readers and more subscribers from downstream recipients of free uses, who click to visit the publisher's website.
- Publishers collect valuable reader data on how their content is being shared and used.
Related Articles:
Email this | Print this | Steal this
The Case for iCopyright's Ad-Supported "Free Uses"
iCopyright's Advertiser-Supported Free Uses
How they work and why iCopyright is the ideal partner
Publishers who want to enable advertising-supported free uses can add the iCopyright Tag to their content by signing up here.
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