Your Website Profit

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

After the popularity of free and open source software, licensing of other types of content has also become popular. With all that free content floating around, there’s one question you should ask yourself: How to monetize it?

The most often used free licenses for text, image and video content are the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons licenses. Even though both types of licenses allow free redistribution, the license terms vary depending on the license.

Free Documentation License

As the name indicates, FDL is for text content. It is in some ways similar to the General Public License for software, emphasizing the “copyleft” nature of the license. It places very few restrictions on modification and commercial use of the original work, but requires attribution to the original author and use of the same license for derivatives.

The largest site of FDL licensed content is without doubt Wikipedia. All text there is licensed under the license. That means that as long as you are willing to license the derivative work under FDL, you have millions of pages worth content available to you.

Creative Commons

There are many versions of Creative Commons licenses, and the rights you have depend on the version. The most lenient license in the Attribution license, which simply requires an attribution to the original author. A work licensed under a “noncommercial” license is, of course, not easily monetized.

Unlike FDL, Creative Commons licenses are often used for image and video content too. Some large sites with CC content include Flickr, where many users have decided to license their work under one of the licenses; and Blip.tv, where the same is true for video content. To easily find CC licensed works, use Creative Commons search.

Monetizing?

Ok, so you’ve found interesting content you can use for free. Now, how to monetize it. The answer depends on the particular license, actually. If commercial use is allowed, you could just sell the content. Of course, you will not easily be able to sell it as is, but by remixing and rewriting you can create quality content effortlessly.

Selling may not be the best option, since buyers may feel cheated after seeing the licensing information. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Other options available to you include sharing the free content on your AdSense site, and using it as pre-sell content.

If you decide to publish the content on your site and rely on search engine traffic, some rewriting is recommended. Search engines tend to rather go with one version of a page, and you will not want to compete with eg. Wikipedia on the SERPs. If search engine traffic is not your main form of traffic, there’s really very little harm in using even exact copies of free articles.

All in all, freely licensed content is not very different from any other content. You can find ways to monetize it just as you could monetize your own content. Only remember to pay attention to the licensing details to avoid copyright infringement.

by Sutocu | October 26, 2007