The Licensing Revenue Model
Full Disclosure: I do not personally know if any companies do what I’ve written about in this post. These are merely some thoughts I had on how to make money by creating a License for others to use.
It has been often discussed and is basically a known fact that the future of the world is Open Source. As technology increases, more and more people want to contribute, and everyone wants to see their idea expand before them without having to do any of the hard work themselves. This is where Open Source comes in. Open Source is having the code available to all, so that others can patch it, can contribute, and can make your idea come to life whether or not you still want to work on it. But that isn’t the topic of today’s post.
With a boost of popularity in the Open Source direction, there is a new seldom-thought of business that has opened up the doors of possibility – Licensing. Open Source users want their ideas expanded, but not stolen, and this is where Licensing comes in.
You see all over the internet different licenses, GNU, MIT, Apache, Creative Commons – and personally, I don’t know a thing about any of them. But if the companies that control them wanted to make money off of their licenses, it would be simple – without even charging the creators of content a penny.
The revenue stream lies in protecting the license. Lets say you’re creative commons, and a absolutely MAGICAL deviantArt artist uses your license for their work, lets say BY-NC-ND, meaning that use of the picture has to be attributed to the artist, and it can’t be used commercially nor can derivative works be made from it without the Artist’s expressed consent. One day, the artist sits down to watch a movie, and sees her wonderful work in the background – Her License has been violated.
If you, Creative Commons don’t do anything to help her, then people don’t believe in your license. Less people use it, and suddenly it isn’t so popular. But if you take on the case, pursue legal action, and sue over it for her, giving her a decent percentage of the profit and keeping the rest, then the artist got her retribution, and you as an organization just made money. Since you were so eager to defend the artist’s rights, more and more people use your license to protect their work.
Is this unethical? No, of course not. The law is on your side. The author said that their work could only be used in this way, and it was violated. You’re protecting the rights of the people, and making money while you’re at it.
It’s Facebook’s Turn to Scratch OUR Back
Quite possibly one of the largest and most influential things pulling users to Facebook has always been the application platform. It’s simple, it’s intuitive, and developers are doing everything they can to make money off the platform, including advertisements and resorting to sleazy scams like Offerpal and SuperRewards, all the while paying Facebook more and more money for advertising that, most of the time appears on other application’s sidebar.
Why has it taken us Developers this long to realize it? Facebook is making a profit off of our applications and giving us absolutely nothing in return. Not only are developers paying Facebook to get more users, but we’re giving them free advertising space and revenue. It’s obviously time that Facebook started scratching the developer’s back by giving them some of the revenue off the advertisements that appear on their own application pages! This would offer application developers a clean, non-scammy, non-shoddy revenue stream with advertisements that would always fit with the Facebook platform policy, without even disrupting the feel of the application.
Facebook is constantly complaining about the scammy and shoddy methods developers implement to try to make their application more viral to manage some form of income, but if Facebook just paid developers a percentage for the advertisements being placed on those same developer’s applications, than the entire Facebook experience would be cleaner and much more appealing to the end user.
Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?