I am always interested in new technologies that help publishers and copyright holders (namely image licensors) to work more closely together to facilitate the sometimes tricky world of content licensing. So today, as I came across a new service called "Gum Gum" I was very interested to see what they had to offer.
Their tagline reads "Licensing media for the Internet finally makes sense." - which is a real attention grabber for those of us that equate media licensing with medieval torture. As I got further into their site copy and value proposition, my elation turned to dismay, then my dismay turned into something else I can't describe... I won't call it loathing, but it wasn't pleasant.
But first let me describe what Gum Gum does that got me a bit excited. They allow image agencies (paparazzi, photographers, etc) to license their content online without actually releasing a digital asset to the publisher, meaning they don't hand over a jpeg or gif, they just give the publisher a code to embed in their blog similar to the way youtube allows publishers to embed videos in other sites. And looking at their user interface, it seemed that they had a very quick, simple and painless process to check out the images and embed them into a site. Point scored. And the fees seemed reasonable. They had quality pictures and an interesting compensation model. Another point scored.
They presented two monetization options, one was a fixed CPM rate, and many of the pictures I viewed were around $0.20 CPM which seems very reasonable (since a well-tuned content-oriented blog should be earning at least $10 CPM), although you would need to be very careful on your article listing (aka teaser) pages, since on a page that listed 20 articles with 2 pictures each you would be losing 20x2x0.20 = $8 page CPM that you would pay out... ouch. I suppose there might be provisions for this in the Gum Gum licensing, I am not sure (I didn't stick around to find out, the reasons for which you'll see soon).
The other monetization model was advertising based, and this seemed so ridiculous I would never even consider it. Most advertisers I know of want to monopolize your premium space. Popular spots include the masthead (leader board) and sidebar (tower ad). The next most profitable ad spot is embedded in the content body. If you chose the advertising based monetization method, your advertisers would be competing for space and clicks with your image advertisements from Gum Gum. If someone clicked on this ad, you lose a visitor and don't get paid (granted, if you click on the ad it creates a new popup window). But 'Nuff said as far as I am concerned, especially if I'm not getting paid for ad space that shows up on my site.
My next step was to check out the Gum Gum blog, where they talked about their product and company in more detail. What caught me at first was the language they used. It seemed to have a very negative bias towards publishers. But perhaps that was just my interpretation. But two statements on their site left me perplexed. The first was:
"On the Internet, however, content lives forever and usage is unknown. And herein lies the problem: How do you fairly price a license when circulation is unknowable?"
Then to hammer in their point they make the following statement:
"Let's look at an example: Say you do a Google search for "Keira Knightley, Atonement Premier" today. You will land on a blog or news page with images of Keira Knightley and the publisher will have monetized your page view. Now, fast forward 5 years into the future and perform the same search. You will end up at a post with the same images and guess what? The publisher is STILL generating ad revenue from EVERY page view he or she receives. So what is happening here? Publishers are paying a flat-rate-fee for photographs and then using the media to monetize their web properties indefinitely. This is a raw deal for content-owners."
Well first of all lets be clear; Offline licensors (e.g. photographers who license their images to magazines) will never know how many times a picture is viewed or how long the image will remain printed in a magazine. They will know some approximate numbers with respect to the distribution and audience size, but they won't know the exact viewership of their image. For example; once I have purchased a magazine, I am free to do with it as I please. I can read it 100 times, I can give it to my friends and they can give it to their friends. After they are all done with it, the dentist's office can have it. Eventually I am sure it will get recycled after someone finally takes home the tattered remains from the dentist's office and has one last look at it before dumping it in the bin. So the number of "views" the image will receive over the life of the magazine is unknown. My grandmother has magazines that are 40 years old, I doubt the original photographer is still getting paid for views of the images from those issues.
Secondly, no one is more anal about stats reporting and gathering than webmasters. They know exactly how many times an article is viewed on average over the life of a story. They have at their disposal far better historical reporting than any other content medium in all of history. So in my opinion, it is a gross inaccuracy to say that online publishers don't know what will be happening with a story or image over it's lifetime.
Lastly, if this really were an issue, media agencies could simply issue a license with a lifetime, and publishers would just need to retire old content. It doesn't take much to go and scavenge old stories out of your system. And I have yet to see a mid size or small blog that even lasts five years, never mind has their archived stories available over that time frame. Frankly I don't know too many publishers that will lose sleep over the revenue generated from 5 year old images in their system. In fact I don't think many of them would even lose sleep from 1 year old images being removed. The sheer volume of activity in this business is almost overwhelming to begin with. As someone who has managed the back end of a 100 million page view per month entertainment network, I can tell you that it would actually be a blessing to be able to scavenge out old content, at least from a performance and manageability standpoint.
Another point (and this is really just a nitpick), but traffic from Google Images is also one of the the lowest converting traffic sources around (even though it can account for a high volume of traffic).
Also, the reality is that we can't say that every single image that gets licensed is going to show up in a Google image search for a celebrity keyword. And that is what bugs me most about that statement: Google Image results in particular are a good source of traffic for large blogs, but smaller blogs don't even make the radar. And only ONE image from a large blog is going to show up as a search result in Google Images. So if a content licensor gives a celebrity blog a license for 500 Britney Spears photos over a five year time frame, only a very small percentage will ever show up as search results. Or, you are going to depend heavily on long tail searches and highly optimized image galleries. Also, the image search algorithm doesn't follow the same algorithm as the web search. The top ranking site in Google Images for "Bald Britney Spears" at the time of writing on google.ca is only a PR4 blog that isn't even in english.
But for me, here is the greatest irony is this: Using the current Gum Gum technology, you never publish the image asset to your blog, hence the search engines never crawl it, hence you never get traffic from Google images for that image in the first place!
Now the next part of the Gum Gum blog is what disturbed me the most:
We are also excited to announce the GumGum Footer. Below every photo, an HTML footer will display a link pointing to the content owner’s website. Why is this important? It provides the copyright owner with tremendous SEO value!
So, not only do publishers get to pay for every single view of the image, but they also get to pass precious SEO in the form of Page Rank to the copyright owners. As any SEO expert will tell you, any publisher doing this is basically going to lose a lot of their page rank and traffic by posting exit links on every single story on their site, and the copyright owner is going to end up dominating the SERPS (search engine result pages) for the same keywords the publishers are targeting. Google judges the context of a link based on the content and placement it appears in. At least Gum Gum didn't use the celebrity's name in the anchor text for the link.
Now if you are some 300lb gorilla in the celeb gossip world, you may not be concerned about losing PR or linkage, since you've probably got a dedicated audience and have a lot of other traffic acquisition strategies. But for small or mid level blogs, links are a precious commodity. Contextual exit links placed near strategic content pieces are also a precious commodity.
The next MAJOR issue I would have as a publisher using this system is that copyright owners can remove the image at any time from a publishers blog or site with a click of the mouse, leaving the publisher with an "Oops I am not available" message on their site where the image was. For me this is a total deal breaker. At anytime you can have all of the images stripped out of your site and you have no control over it. Sounds like a good deal to me. NOT! Having a message like that at all is just going to make a publisher look foolish. At least Gum Gum could have just made the embed dimensions dynamic and shrunk it down to a 1 pixel by 1 pixel transparent element if the content owner removed it so that it is invisible to the end user, and doesn't make the publisher look like a total idiot (at least I would feel like one).
Now the last technical issue I had with their service is the lack of thumbnails available to publishers. Almost every celebrity blog in existence nowadays has the main article image and a gallery of thumbnails at the bottom of the story to increase link density and page views. This is standard fare in blogs and it is an effective "sticky" tool for publishers to increase page views per visit and keep users on their site. I see no way to accomplish this feature using Gum Gum. This would be a big deal breaker for most of the site owners I know.
So what rights exactly are you purchasing as a publisher? It looks to me like you aren't really buying any. Since:
a) You don't receive the digital asset
b) You have no control over whether or not the image stays on your site
c) You don't get image search engine traffic (since the image doesn't get crawled on your site)
d) You have to give away links at the footer of every image, leeching precious PR to the image licensor and Gum Gum.
e) You never actually receive anything other than an embed code.
f) Doesn't look like you can receive exclusivity (although I may have overlooked this)
Yet you are still paying a non trivial CPM or shared ad spot for the image to show up on your site.
So in summary, I think the Gum Gum service had great potential but needs some MAJOR feature and licensing changes before I would ever consider using it. And I think that any publishers considering using that service would be well advised to do some thorough research before using it on their site or blog. So for now we'll stick to the traditional licensing methods that have worked for us (and our licensors).