By David Utter
Expert Author
Article Date: 2005-11-08
NBA owner and spam blog crusader Mark Cuban sees an opportunity to turn content piracy into content profitability...possibly.
There's an old comic, and I believe it was Superman, where Perry White leaves the Daily Planet building just as the superheroes of the DC universe have averted some crisis. He approaches an old man who runs the newsstand outside the building, and they revisit a long-standing disagreement about displaying newspapers.
The old man always puts the Daily Planet face down. White tells him he'd sell more papers if he put them face up. Not so, the old man says; once someone picks up the paper, turns it over, and sees the headline, he's got them and a sale.
When that paper, we'll call it content since we live in such an advanced age of development, gets purchased, the newsstand gets a piece of the sale, and the paper gets the rest.
Cuban's suggestion that profitable affiliations can bring content providers revenue while making the affiliates money looks like a newsstand approach, except the money comes from the publisher instead of the customer. He sees it as a way to turn copy-and-paste thieves into useful Internet citizens:
The entire content industry is missing a unique opportunity to eliminate most content piracy and more importantly, to generate a whole lot more revenue by offering revenue sharing. If the NYTimes, to use them an example, were to offer 50 pct of the revenue generated from traffic delivered by affiliated websites, not a single website with half a clue would steal your content. Instead, every blogger, splogger and small content creator would look to find ways to link to your content and drive you traffic.
As Cuban points out, the likes of Google and Yahoo use networks to better keep track of who gets what advertising revenue. But affiliate programs can certainly work; eBay has run a successful affiliate program for a while now, as has Amazon.com.
The real trick would be to centralize management of every affiliate and every content provider. Business 2.0 sees a "management nightmare" in tracking that traffic, and who gets paid for sending users to destinations.
