Image licensing platform GumGum has scored a deal to serve free legal images across Glam Media’s publishing network. Glam publishers will have access to photos from Splash News’ catalog of celebrity images, many of which run from $75-500 apiece under standard licensing deals. In lieu of these fees, GumGum will allow publishers to display their images with ad overlays free of charge (publishers will receive around 20% of the revenue from these ads – the rest will go to GumGum, Glam, and Splash).
The deal comes two months after GumGum annouced a major shift in the technology used to power its platform. In the past, the site would issue photographs as Flash objects, which made them easy to track and monetize with ads. But Flash-based images are slow and clunky compared to a normal image file, which made the system unappealing to publishers.
In July GumGum dropped the Flash technology in favor of a system that uses standard image formats. Now, publishers are free to crop and modify their images (which they couldn’t do with the Flash version). GumGum uses a combination of photo metadata and image recognition to identify the licensed photos, and overlays ads accordingly. If a publisher doesn’t want ads to appear on their images, they can pay a modest fee tied to the number of times an image is viewed, rather than the one-time bulk fee typically associated with image licensing.
While GumGum acknowledges that it’s probably possible to fool the image recognition system, it has shifted its business to appeal to legitimate publishers – anyone who wants to pirate an image probably wouldn’t sign up for the service in the first place.
Glam Media is an advertising/publishing network that focuses almost exclusively on content for women. With over 600 member blogs and sites across Glam’s network, GumGum stands to see its userbase grow dramatically – the company speculates that the number of images it serves could potentially double with the deal.
GumGum competitor PicApp forged a similar deal with blog network b5media earlier this year. And Glam’s biggest rival Sugar Inc allows its bloggers to use images from Getty images.
image licensing model is broken just like the music industry. when will these people get it.
This looks like a win-win-win deal for everyone. This is the best model I have seen yet for image licensing.
Sugar Inc.’s OnSugar platform lets you use images from Getty, FWIW.
Yep, I meant to mention to that. Added it to the post.
This is a good thing for all Publishers, getting licensed Photos. I think TechCrunch had written that Media Networks will start offering more services, and this seems like the start of that.
Sugar going down a b5Media path- offering their Drupal Shareware to individuals that may want a personal blog. Having photos is nice, but I don’t see a large number of professional bloggers using them, as they want their own domain and brand, but still useful for their team Sugar Social Networking Profiles. I think they had Blogs, Notes and other Drupal Services turned on.
Glam seems to be going down the road of supporting external publishers build their business, rather than force them to move to Glam Site. The “perks” from their email out are:
Content services: Rights-managed photo access through Splash News (The one mentioned in this post)
Premium video content, from media providers, via the GlamTV platform. This is huge, get licensed Video and high CPM”s!
Audience and Marketing Services: Strategic distribution of publisher
content across sites in the Glam Publisher Network
Custom advertorial services: Graphic design and technical support
for premium brand advertising campaigns, including the creation of
customized website skins, implementation of logo and banner ad takeovers,
editorial support and other services to help publishers create deep brand
engagement.
SEO optimization services: Free site and keyword optimization
services with SEO experts.
God to see these. Much Needed.
The GumGum concept is a great one because it helps publishers to control image costs through variable pricing based on pageviews of their prime real estate and can also help image asset owners increase revenues if their images drive viewership. It’s also great because both sides win as the content goes to archive and you add an ad overlay that drives more monetization. It’s a clever concept where everybody wins. It’s great to see a deal like this struck so we can see how this new models tests “out in the wild”.
Good for Glam. Good for Splash. Good for Glam publishers. Good for GumGum. Good stuff!!
I am very excited about these new services that Glam will be providing and cannot wait until I get these pics for free.
I spoke to Glam’s Commmunity Director today and she clarified that Glam is making no money out of this deal. The money is being split betweek Splash, gumgum and the member publishers. Another reason why I admire what Glam is doing for its members. Way to go Glam!
not a bad concept.
http://gatesand...s.blogspot.com/
Who’s the pretty girl on the picture?
so exciting to see somebody doing something proactive about this problem. This really seems like a win-win-win. Can’t wait to see how it flys in practice. Gumgum is on to something here. Take note.
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Great News! GumGum is a perfect way to get great images for your site and earn revenues of the viewership. It’s like adsense for images. The sites redesign looks nice and clean as well. Congrats on the partnership with Glam.
I am so excited about the news. We pay a lot of money every month for pictures and this will help us a great deal. We are so grateful.
Thank you glam!!!
Splash News has been searching for a way to help publisher and our photographers continue to make great news together. This seems to be a wonderful solution to many of the challenges we are all facing.
Glam and GumGum are wonderful companies and we are so pleased to be working together.
Creating an online daily business magazine for women, like ours, http://www.thenextwomen.com, is very challenging in so far it concerns the photos. if flickr does not have it, then it is unaffordable. public wants video as well, more and more. we like the deal and cannot wait to be part of the glam network.