14 DAY TRIAL // The AP has set out to be the sheriff in the Wild West of the Internet, at least when it comes to regulating news content, and to save the newspaper business and journalism in general at the same time – not an easy task for any organization, even for one of the biggest news networks in the world. Now some details have surfaced about the plan it announced recently to track how its content is being used and to also add licensing options to the articles.
More specifically, using any part of the article, as little as five words, will cost money. And a nice sum too, namely up to $2.5 per word, as Mashable found. To this end the AP signed a deal with widget maker iCopyright to create the payment interface. The widget allows others to use the content, with a pretty straightforward way of licensing it. First they would copy and paste what they want to use and then choose the price for the corresponding number of words.
The prices though are somewhat on the steep side for those using the content “for profit” purposes, starting at $12.50 for five to 25 words and moving up to $100 for more than 250 words. The prices are lower for educational and non-profit uses but still, compared to nothing, it makes a very big difference. The big question, though, is whether anyone or rather how may will pay for this when they can very well go to another source. The AP does have a lot of great material and lots of it exclusive but it may not be enough to convince many.
And, sure $12.50 won't break the bank for large media organizations, even for the bigger blogs out there, but the smaller ones will simply avoid AP content. And while the AP may think the Internet is made up of mostly parasites, from Google to bloggers, it's unclear how it will expect to have any traffic, and thus make any money, with no one linking to its content, as it's hard to believe the $2.50 per word will make up for the lost revenue.