Fair Syndication Consortium Presentation

Fair Syndication Consortium

Simple question: What if… anywhere your content was reused…

you had the option to… share in the ad revenue it generated?

FairSyndication.org

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The Fair Syndication Consortium • Goal – to compensate publishers for their work while respecting the value of appropriate distribution

• Revenue – share in the revenue from sites monetizing full copies of your content

• Control – remove ads from the sites you deem inappropriate for revenue sharing

• Complementary – a new revenue option to complement existing monetization methods and antipiracy efforts. FairSyndication.org

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How big of an opportunity? A $250M annual opportunity that you can turn on in Q3

Estimated by taking feeds from 25 top publishers in January 2009 and applying conservative CPMs to content reuse that consisted of over 80% of the original publisher’s content and at least 125 words. Traffic was estimated using Compete.com data. FairSyndication.org

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How Fair Syndication works Copies of Your Content Across the Web

Registry

1) Feed of your Content Content Producers FairSyndication.org

Web-wide Copy Detection

Reconciliation

4) Revenue $$$

2) Payment Requests

Ad Networks

3) Ad Revenue Share

You receive revenue for all full copy reuse of your content: – across the entire Internet – revenue split with the republishing sites, paid out via the ad networks 5

It’s good for the ad networks • It won’t cost them a nickel – all revenue shared from the site copying your work, not the ad networks

• Instant heroes – [insert ad network] chooses to reward publishers of original content instead of only those reusing your content without authorization

• There is a stick – the ad networks already comply with DMCA takedown notices to remove their ads from infringing content; takedowns mean fewer ads served

• The infrastructure is already in place – requires very little work to deploy FairSyndication.org

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Shouldn't GOOG or YHOO do this? • Doesn’t solve the problem – need to cover all ad networks and reconcile the payments from each to ensure proper remuneration is received

• Less money – without a solution that covers all ad networks, content will jump to new networks, resulting in less money for you

• Less control – you need flexibility to enforce eCPM minimums, branding issues, existing licensing/royalty agreements and anti-piracy FairSyndication.org

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Scenario analysis 1. It does not work… the ad networks decide they want a legal challenge and you receive no additional revenue – Response: always an option but one that the ad networks will risk negative public relations as well as probable legal defeat

2. It does work, but… the amount of money you receive is uninteresting and/or the reusing sites are not brand-worthy – Response: always possible, no downside in finding out

3. It works… ad networks cooperate and you receive additional revenue – Response: everyone wins FairSyndication.org

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How does my organization join? • Signing up is easy – Online: FairSyndication.org – Email me: [email protected]

• Provide a feed – Enables us to start sending instances to the advertising networks to receive monetization information

• There are no costs, fees or dues FairSyndication.org

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Fair Syndication Consortium

The Fair Syndication Consortium • What it is – a collection of 500+ publishers who are demanding full compensation when others make money off their articles

• What it isn’t – an official business entity or clearinghouse; ad revenue share payments for your content are based solely upon your content’s reuse

• What it does – educates stakeholders and organizes publishers to participate in Fair Syndication

FairSyndication.org

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How reuse is detected Detection if advertising & links back to your content are present

Crawl of over 35 billion web pages FairSyndication.org

Highlighting reveals how much of your content is being reused

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Key findings from Jan 2009 study • Tons of reuse – over 30 days, roughly 250,000 articles from the 25 FSC participants were copied in full without permission more than 3.2 million times

• Tons of money – for FSC participants alone this represented roughly $50 million in annual revenue

• Big overall opportunity – best estimates are that the total amount of unauthorized full copy syndication for newspaper publishers totals over $250M annually

FairSyndication.org

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The “Standard/Simple Measures” feed • The Feed – a feed provided to ad networks that identifies which content producers are to be compensated on which pages and from which pages ads are to be removed • The DMCA “safe harbor” requires that service providers must accommodate and not interfere with “standard technical measures.” (Section 512(i)) – FairSyndication Analysis: the law expressly provides for technology solutions to be adopted

FairSyndication.org

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Simple Measures • “Simple Measures” In Perfect10 vs. Amazon, the court said that Google could be held contributorily liable if it had knowledge that infringing content was available using its search engine and Amazon could have taken “simple measures” to prevent further damage and failed to take such steps.

– FairSyndication Analysis: technology now exists to identify infringing content and make that knowledge available to advertising networks. Once provided with this knowledge, an ad network must either remove their ads or… provide revenue back to the original content producer

FairSyndication.org

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Standard Technical Measures • “Standard Technical Measures” are defined as “measures that copyright owners use to identify or protect copyrighted works, that have been developed pursuant to a broad consensus of copyright owners and service providers in an open, fair and voluntary multi-industry process, are available to anyone on reasonable nondiscriminatory terms, and do not impose substantial costs or burdens on service providers.”

– FairSyndication Analysis: the solution must be:  open to publishers of all sizes  costs must not burden service providers  be vetted in an open forum FairSyndication.org

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