I have followed the NLA’s plan to licence the use of paid-for business-to-business web content from newspaper web sites since the NLA announced its plans in June (search my blog for content tagged NLA for more information). Since then publishers have started to raise pay walls and take on Google in a bid to monitise content.
Six months is a long time on the Internet and especially so for newspaper publishers running loss making web operations.
The NLA said today that the web licensing scheme will go ahead from 1 January 2010. Press clipping agencies, web aggregators, PR agencies and client organisations that track web clippings on newspaper web sites will need a licence. Free consumer services will not be affected.
In September the NLA said that the move will generate an estimated £2 million and while this won’t make a significant dent in the £1 billion production budget of the UK newspaper industry, it will ensure that publishers recover a contribution from the after market for web clippings.
In a press release issued today the NLA said that it has reached agreement with almost all press cutting agencies but that it still needed to agree terms with “a small number of paid web aggregators”.
“Newspaper publishers, which own the NLA, have written to the remaining aggregators to express their full support for the NLA’s initiative. The letter makes clear that the publishers and NLA will pursue non-compliant aggregators with technical and/or legal measures as necessary.”
In agency-land any move to implement additional costs will be inevitably be challenged but the ongoing debate about monetising newspaper web content will help the NLA’s case.
The PR industry has responded badly to the NLA web licensing proposals because it has a mindset that content from newspapers web sites is free. And that’s true for now but its starting to change.
We have no way of knowing whether paywalls will work and how newspapers will manage their relationships with search engines. We’re only beginning to see some early indications.
In the meantime the NLA is proceeding with its model to recover revenue for its members.
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This is an amazing can of worms. I foresee the biter bit.
I went to this page in The Times
http://bit.ly/4vMupX
Analised it to get the semantis concepts
http://bit.ly/5xx7Y1
Looked for those concepts in Bing.com and found that loads of other people and publicastion wrote this story in similar terms long before The Times
http://bit.ly/7Lb6Fn
Who, then is going to set up the counter organisation to the NLA to get their money back from newspapers who borrow/plagiarise content from the online community?
Equally, when The Times vanishes behind its firewall will this mean that it will pay all the other sites for the news it plagerises from them as well as suiing all the sites that use the same story after they publish offline or behind the firewall?
Stephen, I can see a lot of people who will eat the breakfast of the publishing industry even sooner than they thought because of these moves.
I just wonder who will write the application that automatically identified the url’s of same/similar content on a Google sidewiki to let everyone see where the media stories really come from? (Then everyone will see, this or that press story really came from a press release/blog/wiki etc….).
Hi David,
This is an interesting debate and you touch on Nick Davis’ concept of Flat Earth News, itself back in the news thanks to the Prime Minister.
We could very quickly get into a debate here about how original ideas are created and how you credit the originator and the organisations that pass that story on.
Isn’t this a debate about a business model that is on its knees because the means of distribution is ubiquitous?
Cheers,
Wadds
[...] Revenues from the Newspaper Licensing Authority’s (NLA) web licensing scheme will make little impact on the losses being racked up by newspaper publishers online. The NLA’s own estimates put annual revenues for the scheme at £2 million. [...]