How much money will my content make from licensing and syndication?

SyndiGate is a global content licensing, sales and distribution business, which at its core, packages and provides licensed content products to its customers via feeds, Content APIs, or via its content marketplace platform DISCO.

The offering includes 6,500+ licensed content products and services to date (for words, images, video, audio and data), including syndication partnerships with global information businesses such as Bloomberg.

And since 2007, when SyndiGate was born, there’s one question that gets asked more than any other… “How much money will my content make from licensing and syndication with SyndiGate?”

Ah, yes, the golden question that nearly every content provider who licenses their content to SyndiGate wants to know. I say “nearly every content provider”, as the money (in the form of royalties or license fees) isn’t always the prerogative of the licensor. There are other non-financial benefits, which I will go into later within this article.

To cut to the chase, the revenue generated (gross) for each publication or content service ranges from $0 – $25,000 p/month. However, to better put this into perspective, read on further to see top-end numbers and success stories for recent licensing deals secured by SyndiGate. 

Factors that will determine revenue

Unless SyndiGate has one or more buyers or licensees who are putting up fixed license fees for your content, it’s near-on impossible to accurately predict short-term or first year revenue projections for a new content provider.

“But tell us what a comparable, or like-for-like content provider is making with SyndiGate!” I hear you say. 

Well, one of the problems with revenue projections for a new content provider to SyndiGate is that two like-for-like publications or content services from the same country; in the same language; covering the same topics; and similar circulation or traffic figures etc. can generate very different royalties and/or license fees. 

The revenue will depend on multiple factors, some of which include:

1) The quality, uniqueness, frequency and volume of your content, as well as your brand recognition.

2) The end-user demand for your content from SyndiGate’s direct and indirect buyers and licensees (at any given time).

3) The scope of the rights being granted. Where a content provider has various distribution restrictions in place (e.g. customer segment blacklists, customer blacklists, territory blacklists, buying/licensing model restrictions etc.), this has a negative impact on the revenue potential with SyndiGate.

SyndiGate provides licensed content to the following typical customer segment types (either directly via feeds, or via our proprietary products and services such as DISCO, or via third party services):

• Broadcasters (Radio, TV, SVOD etc.)
• Content Analytics Companies
• Copyright Collection Services
• Digital Newsstands
• Financial Professionals (Hedge Funds) 
• In-flight Entertainment Systems
• Magazine Publishers
• Major B2C Content Platforms
• Media Monitoring Organisations (MMOs)
• News Websites
• Non-media Brands (Content Marketing Programmes)
• Professional News Platforms
• Reprographic Rights Organisations (RROs)
• Risk & Compliance Services
• Subscription Database Services
• Text & Data Mining (TDM) Companies
• Worldwide School, University, Public and Government Libraries

5) The usage of your content within the various professional news platforms and corporate or academic subscription database services that SyndiGate provides huge volumes of licensed content to (which equates to regular and variable royalties). And that usage very much depends on what an end-user is searching for at any given time. Further, royalties are linked to the subscription fees coming in to these products and services.

6) The accessibility of your content – meaning that if you license and provide content to SyndiGate that is not otherwise freely available online (it could be print only, or partly or fully behind a subscription or a paywall), SyndiGate can usually secure better commercial terms for this material with any of the corporate or academic closed databases that license content from us. 

7) Lastly, and it may seem like an obvious one, but another factor that determines a content provider’s revenue is linked to the core commercial terms (i.e. the percentage of the royalties or fees that SyndiGate is contracted to pay the content provider). The percentage negotiated depends on various factors, including where content providers with unique and premium content; high profile publishing brands; high volume content services; portfolios of titles being licensed; content in high demand etc., can expect to command a more favourable share of the pot. 

Licensing models

SyndiGate’s content offering, along with its various product lines, platforms and distribution channels and partners, serve very different needs within the global information industry (for the corporate, government, academic and media markets).

Depending on the end-customer’s product, service, or usage requirement for the licensed content, the business models can be very different. 

Currently, SyndiGate sub-licenses content to its customers based on one of the following licensing models:

• Fixed License Fee
• Pay-Per-Use
• Share of Advertising Revenue + Minimum Guarantee
• Share of Subscription Fees + Minimum Guarantee
• Usage Based Revenue Share (Royalties) + Minimum Guarantee

SyndiGate then commits to paying its licensed content providers their agreed share of the revenues, royalties, or license fees that have been received by SyndiGate, based on the distribution, usage, or purchase of their content by SyndiGate’s customers.

Here, it is also worth mentioning the  selling of licensed content ‘packages’ to corporate and financial services style customers, including, but not limited to; adverse media screening, anti money laundering (AML), asset management, banks, business intelligence, government institutions, discretionary fund managers, exchanges, hedge funds, information professionals, KYC, media monitoring, newsrooms, PR agencies, quantitative trading funds, researchers, risk and compliance, wealth management companies etc.  

Unlike with pure syndication deals to media outlets, with all of these corporate and financial services style customers, content providers need to understand that SyndiGate would not typically be ‘selling’ individual news sources (e.g BBC News) to these clients. Instead, we sell packages of content – sometimes thousands of sources at once- or filtered content – such as by topic, industry, etc.. by drawing on thousands of licensed news sources from around the globe that we can combine into a single feed or product for the end-customer.

In such cases, payments to our licensed content suppliers (e.g. BBC News) are somewhat simple. We have royalty pools that collect revenue from the various customers. The combined royalties generated are then split up amongst the licensed content suppliers, usually based on clicks, views, or sometimes based on the volume of stories in cases where the customer does not have a direct reporting facility.

Success stories / top-end numbers

Below are some of the recent revenue success stories for SyndiGate’s content providers. The fees detailed are the gross revenues generated prior to paying the content providers their agreed share.

Content Provider: Broadcaster/documentary maker (UK)
Customer: Broadcaster (United Arab Emirates)
Fees Secured: $26,250 for x10 documentaries licensed for dubbing, subtitling and re-broadcasting (via DISCO Content Marketplace)

Content Provider: Book publisher (UK)
Customer: Magazine publisher (USA) via DISCO Content Marketplace
Fees Secured: $13,000 in 1 month for x5 digital adult colouring books

Content Provider: Magazine/bookazine publisher (UK)
Customer: x5 magazine publishers (East Asia) via DISCO Content Marketplace
Fees Secured: $240,000 in 12 months for x60 bookazines (translated into local language in China, Japan and South Korea)

Content Provider: Newspaper (Egypt) – complete digital archive produced by a digitization partner of SyndiGate’s
Customer: Multiple academic research libraries at universities (USA)
Fees Secured: $1,250,000 (3 years sales activity)

Content Provider: Major Newswire (USA)
Customer: Industry focused news website (South Africa)
Fees Secured: $2,750 p/month license fee to re-publish up to x3 stories daily

Content Provider: Financial Markets Newswire (USA)
Customer: Financial Trading Platform (USA)
Fees Secured: $410,000 /annum license fee

Content Provider: Aggregated Broadcast News Package (with sentiment data)
Customer: Financial Trading Platform (USA)
Fees Secured: $1,700,000 /annum license fee

Content Provider: Newspaper (UK)
Customer: News Website (United Arab Emirates)
Fees Secured: $160,000 annual license fee to translate and republish x3 branded newspaper articles p/day

Content Provider: Aviation Magazine (Germany/UK)
Customer: Reprographic rights organisation (USA)
Fees Secured: $126,000 in annual and pay-per-use permission fees

Content Provider: B2B Health Website
Customer: Non-media brand (Australia)
Fees Secured: $375 for each article re-used by the brand on their editorial content marketing blog

Content Provider: Subscription-based business news service (India)
Customer: multiple subscription database services (USA)
Fees Secured: $25,000 p/month in usage-based royalties

Content Provider: Aggregated news offering from Africa, Middle East, Asia
Customer: Content analytics and interpretation – social/news listening marketplace (USA)
Fees Secured: x27 non-media brands at $2,000 – $3,500 p/month license fee in 12 months 

Content Provider: Aggregated news offering from Asia
Customer: Hedge fund (USA)
Fees Secured: $11,000 p/month fixed license fee

Content Provider: Aggregated offering of broker research, regulatory content and company disclosures from Africa, Middle East, Asia, Oceania
Customer: AI-driven market intelligence search engine platform (USA)
Fees Secured: $10,000 p/month minimum guarantee, plus usage based royalties 

Content Provider: Economic ‘data’ indicator provider (for African countries)
Customer: AI driven medical data company (USA)
Fees Secured: $7,500 p/annum (100 indicators, updated monthly)

Content Provider: Historical, iconic and rare image collections (UK)
Customer: Exhibition organisers, fashion houses, book publishers, TV producers, filmmakers, infrastructure project managers, museums, news organisations and magazines via DISCO Content Marketplace
Fees Secured: $120,000+ in 12 months 

Non-financial benefits

Aside from regular royalties, license fees, or other payments from the copying, usage or reproduction of your content, there are various other benefits that SyndiGate can offer its content providers, some of which include:

* Worldwide marketing of your content (at zero cost to you) to potential new buyers

* Increased traffic (our customers use your canonical links when they publish to boost your SEO and drive users back to your digital properties).

* increased distribution and visibility

* Improved brand recognition

SyndiGate content partnerships

Let SyndiGate be your global content sales partner. We can help expand the reach of your content; increase penetration in existing and new markets; provide potential for supplemental revenue; and streamline administrative workflow associated with subscription, licensing and syndication tasks. We look to create long-lasting and friendly relationships with our content partners.

By partnering with SyndiGate, you’ll ensure that your content is viewed by a large and diverse group of end users. You can benefit from increased visibility; improved brand recognition; additional website traffic; and increased revenue or sales (in some cases, we can help drive your subscription business). Our various product lines and distribution channels serve different needs within the information and media industries.

Dedicated Sales Team: SyndiGate’s global sales force power is a great asset to our content partners – working in tandem with SyndiGate’s content curation/recommendation team, we get to know your content and then match and place it based on our deep knowledge of the industry and the content needs of the diverse customers we serve worldwide.

Mark GATTY SAUNT is the Co-Founder and Director of Content Sales & Licensing at SyndiGate (which he started in 2007), plus the chief product designer of DISCO (a platform owned and operated by SyndiGate). He has been involved in the licensing and distribution of digital content since the mid 90s and considered an industry veteran in this space. For further information on Mark’s background, please refer to his LinkedIn profile page. 

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