The online world is different from the offline world. Value is calculated differently, rules are enforced differently. When an industry attempts to apply a decades-old business model to the Internet, without accounting for the very real ways in which the Internet is different, the results are generally disastrous. For brevity’s sake we’ll avoid going into the multitude of examples where this is currently playing out. Suffice it to say there is no shortage of reasons for why this happens: Underestimating the value proposition and/or threat the Internet represents, fear of change, eventual acceptance of change without knowing how to change, bureaucracy, absence of the right technology, panic.

GumGum is focused on content licensing. More specifically, GumGum solves the very real problem of how content is licensed for the Internet. Offline, content is licensed for a finite period of time to a predictable audience. These parameters enable content-owners and publishers to come up with reasonably good pricing arrangements. 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?

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.

It is the recognition of this glaring market inefficiency that led us to create GumGum.

GumGum’s solution is to bill publishers on a per-use basis. This means every time a piece of content licensed through GumGum is viewed, that view is monetized. We have built technology to safely distribute, track and monetize consumption of media online. This enables publishers to absorb costs alongside revenue, thereby eliminating the capital-intensive barriers to entry. This also puts control back into the hands of content-owners where it belongs.

GumGum offers two monetization models: Pay-Per-Use and Ad Overlay. With Pay-Per-Use content owners set a CPM and publishers can license unadulterated media. The second monetization option is Ad-Overlay in which we display a non-invasive [video] ad on top of media and monetize content that way – publishers can license media free with this option. With either model content-owners realize the full value of their content over time.

I recently read a quote in a Forbes article taken from a large publisher’s conference that made me smirk: “I don’t know what to do, but I am ready to do it” the speaker said in talking about how newspapers should handle online publishing. This statement, to me, so succinctly represents the general feeling of industries at large, and, more relevant to GumGum, photographers, videographers and content-creators/owners in general in adapting to the Internet. Well, we believe we are the answer content-owners don’t yet know they have.

There are so many benefits, but we’d rather let the product speak for itself.

We look forward to hearing from you!