ImageSpan, arvato Partner for Global Digital Content Clearinghouse

Several of the world’s marquee publishers and media companies, including the Chicago Tribune and the McEvoy Group – a publisher whose brand media properties include SPIN magazine and Chronicle Books – already have begun to develop new markets, direct customer relationships and drive incremental revenues via the joint solution. The clearinghouse empowers all types of media companies to extend their reach in the fast-growing marketplace for digital content by letting them publish their digital assets safely, efficiently and directly to the Web and global search engines so that anyone, anywhere in the world can find their search-optimized content and pay for it with a mouse click. It unites targeted billing and payment options for institutional and private buyers with sophisticated royalty calculation and global disbursement mechanisms for sellers.

“LicenseStream and PaymentLounge together reduce the inefficiencies of the content distribution lifecycle and improve profit margins by fully monetizing the value of content,” said Andrea Kaminski, President International Finance, arvato finance services. “By combining PaymentLounge’s global comprehensive lifecycle transaction services with LicenseStream’s automated content licensing intelligence, we are delivering a strong and unique solution for the media industry that enables easy, secure and real-time billing and settlement. With this solution, content owners and their customers will be able to conduct secure transactions in more than 60 countries worldwide using multiple currencies and payment types.”

According to Michael McGuire, research vice president with Gartner’s Media Industry Advisory Services, “As the audiences for content of all kinds fragment under the influence of online access and distribution, the media industry’s multi-billion-dollar revenue streams are at risk, prompting the need for secure, reliable technology environments that can help media companies monetize their digital content in a way that helps them fully realize its value, especially as consumers are looking for high-velocity, low-friction access to content,” McGuire said.

“By joining LicenseStream with arvato finance’s PaymentLounge services we are creating a new category of infrastructure that addresses a monetization gap – an automated content clearinghouse -- and generates revenues for content producers and owners in several significant ways,” said Iain Scholnick, chief executive officer, ImageSpan. “First, it makes the content itself the storefront and shortens the throw between search, discovery and payment. Secondly, it will handle the huge and complex problem of collecting and distributing royalties to millions of rights holders on a global basis. Finally, through content tracking, it turns a media owner’s catalog of content existing anywhere on the Internet into multiple agents that drive or point traffic back to the owner’s website, so that this global content clearinghouse functions in a fashion very similar to an ad network. Through this content network effect, the site click-through and ad impression value is considerable and unprecedented. The net-net is that LicenseStream and PaymentLounge together speed the pace of transactions, deliver Web traffic and drive incremental revenues and customer interaction on a global basis.”

Randall Weissman, news administration editor of the Chicago Tribune, said that the company selected the LicenseStream solution because it offers an opportunity for financial growth at a critical time for the media.

“All newspapers are looking for ways to leverage their assets as the traditional revenue streams decline,” Weissman said. “We think LicenseStream offers the Tribune an opportunity to market our extensive collection of historic images through the Web and major search engines while protecting our intellectual property.”

The combination of LicenseStream with PaymentLounge also provides a great way to offer customers more choice, said Jack Jensen, president of the McEvoy Group and of Chronicle Books. The McEvoy Group includes San Francisco-based Chronicle Books; Bellevue, Wash.-based Becker & Mayer and, and Hartle Media, which publishes San Francisco’s 7X7 Magazine and California Home Design. In addition, McEvoy Group is the publisher of rock music magazine SPIN.

“This relationship with ImageSpan and arvato finance allows us to highlight and monetize photography at each of our McEvoy Group properties in new ways that benefit not only us, but also our creative talent,” said Jensen. “Having just completed the SPIN online store—we have plans to finish by launching the Chronicle Books’ one in 2010—we are excited to see how quickly and easily LicenseStream with PaymentLounge allows us to feature and monetize two decades of SPIN images on a global basis. By enabling us to make this content available online in a secure, cost-effective way, LicenseStream and PaymentLounge together allow us to offer a new service to our photographers, one that provides more exposure for their work as well as a new revenue stream for them and for each of our publishing properties. That’s a terrific win for the photographers, photography lovers, and for our business.”