Global Internet traffic will be nearly four times larger in 2013 than it is in 2009, according to a forecastreleased by Cisco last week. By the end of 2013, says the report's executive summary, the equivalent of 10 billion DVDs will cross the Internet each month.

Internet video, which now accounts for about one-third of all consumer Internet traffic (not including the amount exchanged through P2P file sharing), the report adds, will account for more than 60 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2013.

As Tyler Willis subsequently pointed out in MediaPost's Video Insider column, the question this massive growth projection raises is: which business models will be poised to take advantage of this trend? Writes Willis: “While video advertising is predicted to increase steadily, especially as television dollars move online, it won’t increase large enough to meet the new demand. According to eMarketer, online video advertising spending is projected to increase less than 30% into 2010. There’s an urgent need for new business models that will help the market monetize this massive increase in attention.”

ImageSpan’s LicenseStream service offers just such a business model.  LicenseStream’s market-leading licensing and royalty payment automation platform addresses the issue of monetization in a couple of critical ways:

• LicenseStream is the first service to enable content creators to publish their content directly to the Web and global search engines, enabling anyone in the world to find their search-optimized content and pay for it with a mouse click. This essentially makes the content itself the storefront. The implications of this are clear: this innovation will dramatically speed the pace of transactions and drive incremental revenues. In this era when crumbling old-line media and distribution channels are being replaced by aggressive, Web-based middlemen, the ability for any creator or enterprise to go directly to consumers is a huge boon.

• LicenseStream cuts out the inefficiencies associated with current manual processes for selling or licensing content. Until now, companies seeking to monetize video or any other type of content they run into a wall because their content revenues can’t cover the costs associated with processing content licensing transactions. In fact, the more content they have, the greater the negative calculus. As a result, the fragmentation of content means that most companies have a tough time justifying the cost of putting the head as well as the long tail of their content on their Web. By automating the costly, manual processes of registering, licensing, tracking, accepting payment and distributing royalties for creative content – videos, photos, images, music and even text -- LicenseStream’s royalty distribution services can deliver immediate payment to content providers anywhere in the world – minus the hefty costs of building systems to manage these new value streams. 
  

To learn more about how individuals and businesses can monetize the massive amount of content (including video) coming online, check out our full range of offerings at www.licensestream.com. Better yet, to try a free, 30-day trial for LicenseStream Creator, click here.

Here's a special shout to all of you specializing in video content:

Our Founder and CEO, Iain Scholnick, had a really interesting and cool interview with the DV Show today.  I think many of you in our videographer community will find this information really exciting and worth your time. The talk was primarily about how to license your video, the benefits for videographers, how to get started, and some fascinating Q&A from the audience regarding today's market opportunities.  If you are remotely curious about licensing your video content and archives, visit http://thedvshow.com/blog/  to hear the recording.

Enjoy.... and I'd love to hear your feedback!

When licensing your creative work, your first decision is on what kind of license to use. While most pro photographers are intimately familiar with licensing, many newcomers and folk from other creative fields can benefit from a quick introduction to the main type of creative licensing.

Simply put, a license is a legal contract that defines the manner in which the license “buyer” can use your creative works. It’s important to remember that the creator never actually “sells” their creative work, but rather just provides the right for a buyer to use it in a certain manner.

Rights Managed
Rights Managed licenses are used traditionally in the photography field and virtually every factor about usage goes into calculating the price of the license: duration, region, type of distribution, amount of distribution, exclusivity, etc.

This model is favored by top pros because it is very specific and ensures that a work's creator gets fair payment based on the value derived by the client. Because of the complexity traditionally associated with this type of license, this licensing model is often not used in low priced transactions.

Royalty Free
Royalty Free licenses differ from Rights Managed licenses as they place no limitations on usage or duration of usage on the part of the license buyer. Generally, the only limitation is that buyers can not resell the image. In the photography and video fields, pricing usually varies based on the resolution of the piece that is bought (i.e. higher resolution images cost more money).

Royalty Free is the licensing model typically used by the many online stock photo sites. As such, Royalty Free has become associated in some circles with “cheap” images. While this is true to some extent, you can still profit through the Royalty Free model if you are careful about pricing and the locations through which you sell your work.

Rights Simple
Rights Simple is a model developed by ImageSpan whereby buyers get a license for a specific use but are not limited by the industry or region in which they use the work. In many ways this license is a hybrid of Royalty Free and Rights Managed, providing many benefits of both.

In most cases, Rights Simple transactions of similar quality are priced higher than Royalty Free and lower than Rights Managed.

Pricing is an interesting challenge. It’s worth remembering that by pricing your works a bit higher, you are actually doing a service for your clients. A higher priced image typically has less distribution than a similar cheaper image, meaning that it is much less likely to be used in a competitor’s site or publication. This is, of course, most true in the case of exclusive Rights Managed images, where the buyer typically pays a large premium for exclusive use of a creative work.

The best advice about model releases is that if you think there’s any chance you might need one for a shot or creative work, then it’s definitely best to get one. That said, let’s have a look at some of the high level guidelines for releases:

• If there are people in your shots and there’s no way they can reasonably be identified, then you generally do not need a release.
• If the image or work is to be used exclusively for the purpose of news reporting then you generally do not need a release.
• If the image or work is to be sold or used to promote a commercial product then you should definitely obtain a release from every individual who is identifiable.

This is by no means a complete list of guidelines, but should help you understand some of the cases where you need a release.

You can download a sample of a model release at dphotojournal.com. Please note that requirements for releases can vary in different regions or countries, so it’s definitely worth looking up the requirements of your particular locale.

Want to make it easier for buyers to find your work on search engines?

Descriptive text and links are two areas that can make a huge difference.

Descriptive text
Whether you’re editing your own site or your LicenseStream Gallery, your first step to search engine success is to write lots of descriptive content about your featured content. It’s critically important to write your descriptions in the language your clients use for searching. Chat with a few clients and simply ask them what terms they use when they search.

Make sure that your description contains enough detail that you’ll come up high in the search rankings if someone is doing a very specific search. For instance, you don’t want to stop at “Dog catching Frisbee” in your description. Keep going and include all relevant details such as “Vertical shot of dog catching Frisbee in Central Park on a summer morning.”

Links
How important are links to your pages/content to search engines? Put it this way: if you don’t have someone linking to your page, Google doesn’t even index it. As critically important as it is to have at least one link, the more links you have from relevant sites the higher your placement in the search rankings.

Search engines consider pages that are linked to from related sites are “higher quality” and they rank these pages accordingly. You will want to take care when looking for opportunities for others to link to you because “link exchanges” or direct link swaps are discounted and can even be penalized by the search algorithms.

Look for an upcoming post where we’ll explore responsible linking strategies in greater depth.

Note: If your potential clients are agencies who will be searching by detailed shoot information then the Keyword Generator in LicenseStream in the “Activate Content” process can be a big help. This keyword set is leveraged when visitors search your LicenseStream Gallery. You can also copy and paste these keywords and use them right on your site or blog – wherever you have that particular shot displayed.