The business case for buying a DAM system to enhance productivity by helping users to find assets more quickly is fairly widely understood by most end users. In some situations, however, either that isn't enough to justify the expense of a new DAM system or there are additional factors that cause organizations to look for other ways to make the investment case stack up.
This is when the subject of revenue generation with DAM often first gets discussed. In this article, I will outline several key areas where end users often go wrong with their DAM revenue generation initiatives and what you can do to avoid them.
Revenue Generation Using DAM - Is It Worth Attempting?
If you are contemplating revenue generation using your DAM solution, you need to be fully aware that you are effectively starting a business and, as such, both the risks and your chances of achieving your revenue objectives require sober assessment.
In the stock media industry, the overall revenue distribution is less 80/20 and more like 95/5 in favor of the established major players (some of whom are multi-billion dollar enterprises). Many smaller libraries often struggle to cover their costs and the competitive environment is getting tougher, so the odds are not favorable for new entrants.
In the case of images, the 'micro stock' libraries have further lowered the cost bar and increased the supply of very cheap but usable stock assets. The economics of the stock media industry are not completely like a commodity market, but at an aggregate level, they do have many of the characteristics of one, so it's essential to have some points of differentiation.
Why Will Anyone Buy Our Stuff?
This is a hard question to answer but you need to think about it very early on. A good reason is because you own the copyright to assets which another third party cannot offer and anyone who wants to buy it must go through you (see previous point). Organizations that have unique content, for example, historical images/footage or artistic works seem to do better than more easily reproducible material which asset buyers can get from alternative sources. If your material isn't that special, no one will buy it unless you compete on price (which, as explained, is difficult to do these days).
How Will We License Our Assets?
There are a wide range of licenses you can use when offering your assets for sale. For images, these tend to boil down to two basic types: rights managed and royalty free. With rights managed, the fee scale alters depending on the type of usage. Royalty free is usually a fixed price that does not change based on where or how many times the asset is used.
Rights managed tends to be initially favored by many asset owners to resolve pricing dilemmas and internal arguments, but the trade-off is that either you need to build more complicated online pricing calculators or ask users to contact you to discuss a fee (all of which will take up staff time and require someone on-hand who can price the assets based on proposed usage).
Is It Worth Trying To Protect Assets With DRM Technologies?
The short answer to this one is probably not. In general, DRM technology might be effective at identifying infringement, but then you will require attorneys etc to try and claim your fees from them. This is expensive and unless you can do it on an industrial scale (as the bigger libraries are able to), then the cost outweighs what penalty charges you might be able to extract. It could be argued that preventing the initial download of a media file through access controls in your DAM system is worthwhile, but once the file is in the hands of a third party, you have little control over what happens to it.
What you definitely should do, however, is ensure that all your assets contain embedded metadata in a format such as IPTC or XMP (both the originals and any proxies). If you do later discover infringement by a more prominent user where it could be worth pursuing a claim, it's much easier to demonstrate ownership and also that you have asserted your rights. This also makes it harder for the infringer to claim it was an "orphan work" (asset where the owner could not be identified).
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Source : cmswire[dot]com
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