Recently launched startup GumGum hopes to change the way that internet publishers license content like movies and photographs. The goal: making it easier for content providers to keep track of, and get paid for, the number of times that their content is viewed.
The current content licensing model used by most photographers is based on the shorter shelf-life of offline publications like newspapers and magazines instead of the web's almost infinite archives. GumGum hopes to transform content licensing into a dynamic application which addresses the differences in copyright on the internet versus in the physical world.
The company intends to do that by convincing contributors to upload photos and movies to GumGum, and enticing publishers to embed GumGum's Flash-based embeddable code rather than upload the file. Once the publisher embeds the code, GumGum hosts the image file and uses its proprietary authentication software to track the number of times the image is viewed. Based on that, it calculates the licensing fee owed to the content owner. If a publisher would like to host the image for free, GumGum has an ad-supported model which overlays advertising on the image, revenue from which it shares with the content owner.
GumGum founders Ari Mir and Ophir Tanz funded GumGum with $125,000 raised from friends and family and the proceeds from the sale of their previous startup, image sharing widget company Mojungle.
Will it work? For content creators, this seems like a dream startup. Because revenue is generated from both ad-supported displays and licensing fees, the contributors who upload their pictures will receive payment if anyone uses their images.
It might be trickier to convince publishers to change their ways, particularly if that means paying more for images than they currently do, but Mir believes that GumGum offers a compelling alternative, because there's no upfront costs for the publisher -- the fees assessed are based on traffic, which is realized over time.
GumGum has also started to target photography agencies to use the GumGum platform. So far, the company has signed up agencies Starmax, X17, and BWP, and is working on migrating these agencies' archives into the GumGum database, a task they expect to complete next week. X17, best known for its paparazzi photos of celebrity Britney Spears, sued blogger Perez Hilton for distributing X17-owned content without a proper license.
