Content Economy Consulting
Whether it’s the syndication of video, text, images, monetization widgets, or data we assist both producers and users’ licensing goals.
Drive, defend, and manage revenue
Minimize cost and create efficiencies
Protect against abuse and brand dilution
Audit to investigate, identify, and resolve usage and terms issues
Content partner management
Confident rights clearance for new business models
Authoritative testimony
Technical support and services
For Brands
WE HELP YOU MAXIMIZE YOUR EARNED MEDIA WITH RIGHTS
The preservation of your positive (and sometimes negative) coverage is important and its lifespan often hinges on the viability and survival of a new media distributor. We can help you acquire assets with the rights you need to assure that your intended use is effective and free from risk whether it’s a simple copy or distribution rights for your media relations, PR, or content marketing efforts.
Case Study (Multiplying the content marketing value of earned media with usage rights):
A popular vehicle location and recovery tool invested to build a video gallery or amazingly positive local news coverage of their product featured on broadcasts around the US. Their broadcast media monitor was incapable of authorizing publishing or distribution and offered a ‘downloadable copy’ under their (ultimately challenged) interpretation of “fair use”.
Instead of hosting and preserving copies for use in their own platforms and controlled technology, they instead used an embeddable video player from an ad-supported aggregator who had rights to store and host the video. In time, the aggregator lost even the right to store metadata such as title, thumbnail, and description from hundreds of local TV stations and in turn videos in the brand’s video gallery archive would simply stop playing and would instead display a ugly error in the embed and devalue the entire project making the gallery appear broken and unkempt while robbing the brand of its ability to relay it’s best stories from sources that potential customers trust…
RightsViper can acquire a la carte and ad-free usage rights for these critical broadcast media assets to afford the preservation and control needed to present these stories using your own platform and technologies with social links back to your domain rather than that of the content owner or aggregator.
For Aggregators and Publishers
WE HELP YOU ACQUIRE, MANAGE, AND MAXIMIZE CONTENT VALUE
Content Acquisition, Integration, Content Partner Management.
We can assist with the sourcing, negotiation, and technical acquisition of content in a variety or methods (FTP, RSS, API, etc) either as full feeds and complete with all assets, a subset of assets (metadata and images with links) or a subset with the provider or distributor’s widget (player, embeddable object).
Performance and Revenue / Revenue-Share Reporting; Analytics
Content performance and revenue performance reporting and analytics is often overlooked or poorly planned resulting in tremendous future effort and labor.
Content Integration, Distribution, and AdOps / Monetization.
We can advise and provide technical consultation as well as labor and expertise to execute feed integration, player and ad-server deployments and modifications, and video platform launches from concept at the platform level, or as integrators and troubleshooters for content partner management, player technology, and comlex ad operations, tag management, and reporting for networks and campaigns.
Case Study (Vertical channel-building while solving the Ad Ops “News Dilemma” with hyper-efficient curation, quality and sentiment flagging, and ad taxonomy tagging):
Having authored the “News Dilemma” after seeing first-hand the loss of advertising dollars due to underlying content topics in premium video news clips (ex, major ad networks halting ads due to an aggregator’s inability to identify news stories about violence against a protected class) a deep strategy was born to efficiently bulk-tag the existing assets’ metadata (where the content owner may have originally used the tags “home page” and “pets” even though the story was of horrifying abuse). By modifying the calls to the distributor’s API to simply avoid certain stories based on topic or even length, then bulk applying new metadata to the remaining stories the result was automated channels of exceptional editorial quality and a far higher probability of sponsor-relevant consumption. This resulted in vertical subsets of very premium inventory with high assurances for brand safety and favorable consumablity while continuing to offer less palatable topics and avoiding unmonetizable topics altogether.
For Content Owners
WE HELP YOU DISTRIBUTE CONTENT
We can provide assistance with licensing and syndication, technology and product support, services, reporting, monetization, audit rights / labor and methods, quiet investigations, lead generation for new distribution, as well as existing content distributor and content publisher optimization and management.
Case Study A (Dogmattic pricing fantasy missing 90% of the revenue potential)
Fresh eyes and domain expertise can offer a dramatic change in the landscape. In one case a digital first CEO was adamant about measuring video content distribution success as a CPM and wanted to offer premium licensing using a CPM model with goals of $50 CPMs on views. This was a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees with a final epiphany that the most valued distributors had the potential to generate substantial revenue with almost no views as their consumers valued the metadata more than the video’s playability. This led to a back-ed in eCPM of over $1200 on views and consistent monthly income without brand dilution or cannibalization.
Case Study B (AdOps errors wipe out almost all syndication revenue shares)
In many cases, we do not need your distributors to know we are reviewing their Ad Ops efficacy in production or against a variety dimensions using their reporting API or reports results. Complaints that revenue shares are too small or non-existent may have simple explanations or be using non-compliant tags or failing to pass unfilled inventory back.
Case Study C (Bandwidth utility pricing error at a hosting vendor increases costs more than 100x)
Sometimes even internal distribution initiatives hinge on vendors and some vendors are tempted to provide a lot of potential value and go to market before the bugs are worked out. There are unfortunate times where the ROI will be proven impossible, but others, as in one case, where the concept was great and there would be ROI if the vendor issued credits and corrected their platform calculations to invoice using correct metrics!
Case Study D (The distributor’s interface dream vs monetization simplicity)
Content owners often fail to respect Ad Ops in a way that jeopardizes security, but also limits their ability to negotiate and simplify their distributors proposals. While many distributors fantasize about building great interfaces for revenue and rights management, they fall short the end goal of revenue sharing can often be fast-tracked with managed inventory shares rather than revenue. You can hope for the best for a revenue share, or you can deploy your tags, with your ad partners, and your revenue on your schedule and wired to your account all while affording real time reporting and total transparency.
For Expert Testimony
WE HELP EXPLAIN TO LAYPEOPLE THE COMPLEXITIES OF VIRAL DISTRIBUTIONS
It’s easy to identify when your content has been ultimately misused, and painful to be accused of misusing someone else’s content. It is of utmost importance to get a clear sense of a type of “chain of possession”, to the answer to the question “how did the content get here” and gain a sense of the actual or financial injury or benefit.
Case Study (A YouTube clip redistributed online, in broadcast, on cable, and online again!):
One of our favorite cases involved a great viral clip, best intentions, and a pachinko machine of convoluted publishing use resulting in a stack of demand letters, intentions to sue, and fire drills.
Footage from the YouTube clip was used on air by a local broadcaster applying what it believe was an acceptable level of attribution in exchange for use. What the broadcaster didn’t realize was that all aired content was digitally clipped for use on their website and was then shared among sister stations for use on air and online as well as redistributed to online syndicators, cable operators through automated content sharing arrangements, and ultimately on the YouTube channels of all who used the footage in a broadcast and therefore re-started the entire digital clip-distribution process again. Before long, the clip was everywhere with no benefit to the owner and confusion among the publishers.
Our knowledge of the systems and characters involved as well as a few tricks to lift fingerprints from most visible abuses resulted in best case scenario for all involved. A financial settlement was reached with each distributor at levels making the content owner feel whole, while saving time, labor, and legal costs as and removing the risk for a potential judgments at more than 40x the actual settlement amounts.