Getting publisher permissions for the 1,000 plus newspaper and magazine websites media monitoring businesses wish to include in their online products would be a nightmare, but NLA offers a simple solution. For a fixed annual fee of less than £5 per publisher per year these businesses can scrape publisher sites and provide a wide range of services to clients. Unsurprisingly the licence is increasingly popular and in June NLA signed the 30th media monitoring licence for web content. Through them we license several thousand businesses to use web material to support their PR and marketing activity.
Effective licensing solutions can create bridges between users, service suppliers and publishers that benefit everyone. Licensing creates a common interest between publishers and providers to ensure a good user experience, and when that works it encourages investment. The fact NLA now delivers paywall content to many users through its eClips service is a very relevant example, as is the further investment NLA and publishers have made in providing page view data through our innovative new AIM (Article Impact Measurement) service.
The growing number and range of professional web content services is proof that the licensed market is healthy. The variety of new partners that web licensing has generated is also broadening our view of the market. While many are in the core media monitoring business (who said what about my company), there are many addressing other niche and new areas. The challenge of responding to these and to developments in the core services means we can’t sit still and need to innovate.
The list of licensees is here. We confidently expect the number of licences – and revenue to publishers - to grow.