Entries tagged with “revenue share” from Tools of Change for Publishing

"Amazon Tax" Moves Forward in New York

Mac Slocum
January 14, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

A judge has dismissed lawsuits from Amazon and Overstock.com challenging New York's "Amazon tax," which was enacted last year. From the Associated Press:

The law applies to companies that don't have offices in New York, but have at least one person in the state who works as an online agent -- someone who links to a Web site and receives commissions for related sales.

In this case, "agent" is synonymous with "affiliate." Amazon and other online retailers share a cut of revenue generated by affiliate referrals. If further appeals go against Amazon and, as expected, other states jump on the sales tax bandwagon, affiliate programs of all sorts could take a major hit.

The AP notes that the law applies to "companies that have $10,000 or more in New York sales." There's some confusion around this $10,000 figure -- does it apply to companies that run affiliate programs (e.g. Amazon) and generate $10,000 or more in New York-based sales, or does it refer to affiliates who earn $10,000 through revenue share agreements? According to Law.com, the company that sells the products is held to the $10,000 standard. As such, a company could not skirt the law by cutting off individual New York-based affiliates before they reach $10,000 in referral sales. To avoid collecting New York sales tax altogether, companies would have to limit the combined income from all New York affiliates to less than $10,000.

(Via the Reading 2.0 list)

Related Stories:

• Law.com: "A Taxing Online Issue Out of New York"
• New York State Girds for War With Amazon
• The Realities of Big Web Traffic and Advertising
• Watch the YouTube Video, Buy the Product

Politico Expands Content Sharing Service

Mac Slocum
December 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Here's a sliver of positivity from the gloomy news business: Politico's content sharing network has added more than 100 clients since launching in September. From Editor & Publisher:

Politico Network, which makes the political news Web site's content available in exchange for advertising placement, launched Sept. 9, according to Beth Frerking, an assistant managing editor.

Newspapers and broadcast outlets utilize the content for their Web sites in exchange for placing advertisements provided by Politico, with revenue shared by both.

Frerking says different content packages are available that provide between five and 15 Politico items per week. The more content the client uses, the less their share of the ad revenue.

"We sell ads for the entire network and the revenue is based on how much you use, either 50%, 40% or 30%," she explained. "Rather than charging you for it, it works like this."

CNN is also getting into the sharing/subscription game via its recently announced wire service, which is positioned as an alternative to the Associated Press wire.

Related Stories:

• Tim McGuire: "POLITICO'S move is another episode in the AP/Newspaper saga"
• Politico Expanding Staff, Circulation and Ad Space
• Newspaper Chain Refuses to Renew AP Contract
• Target, Serve and Adapt: A Simple Model for Audience Development
• The Media Industry's Perspective Problem

Reaction to Google Book Search Settlement

Mac Slocum
October 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (6) | Listen

Updated 10/30, 7:53 AM -- Publishing experts, bloggers and interested parties are weighing in on the Google Book Search settlement. I'll be updating this post as new material comes in. If you see something that deserves notice please post a comment:

Posts Added October 30

On the Google Book Search agreement
(Larry Lessig, Lessig Blog)

The hard question for the registry is how far they will go to support the range of business models that authors and publishers might have. E.g., Yale Press "Books Unbound" and Bloomsbury Academic both have Creative Commons licensed authors. Will the registry enable that fact to be recognized? Indeed, though the comment was made by someone from the plaintiffs' side that it would be "perverse" for authors to choose free licensing, it is perfectly plausible that an author would choose to make his or her work available freely electronically, but contract with one commercial publisher to deal with selling the physical book, or licensing rights commercially. That, again, is the Bloomsbury Academic business model. Ideally, this non-profit should encourage the widest range of rights-respecting business models. One clear signal about what kind of organization this is will come from this.

Posts Added October 29

My initial take on the Google-publishers settlement
(Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything)

From the beginning, this has seemed to be a major example of corporate welfare. Libraries at public universities all over this country (including the one that employs me) have spent many billions of dollars collecting these books. Now they are just giving away access to one company that is cornering the market on on-line access. They did this without concern for user confidentiality, preservation, image quality, search prowess, metadata standards, or long-term sustainability. They chose the expedient way rather than the best way to build and extend their collections.

Short Term Profits Over Long Term Principles; Google's Caving On Book Scanning Is Bad News (Mike Masnick, Techdirt)

... it's quite upsetting to see Google cave on this. The settlement does not establish any sort of precedent on the legality of creating such an index of books, and, if anything pushes things in the other direction, saying that authors and publishers now have the right to determine what innovations there can be when it comes to archiving and indexing works of content. Unfortunately, this was really inevitable. As was the case with Google caving on YouTube and the Associated Press, it becomes a situation where Google realizes it can throw a little cash at the problem to make it go away -- while also creating a large barrier to entry for any more innovative startup. From a short-term business perspective this might make sense, but from a long-term business perspective (and wider cultural perspective) it's terrible.

Google Book Search Lawsuit Settled, Fair Use Questions Remain ... (Sherwan Siy, Public Knowledge)

But while the legal landscape isn't altered too much by the settlement, the practical landscape could be. Rightsholders and other potential plaintiffs might view this settlement as the model for all future relationships with digitization efforts--if Google pays for digitizing, why shouldn't everyone else? Such a landscape might make a plaintiff more likely to sue, although the results in court, ideally, shouldn't differ, with or without this settlement in place.

Boondoggle in Google Rights Win? (Warning, Rant) (Erik Sherman, Erik Sherman's WriterBiz)

Going forward, people will buy books they want online and libraries will pay for access. Who gets 37 percent of the revenue? Google. Plus, there's advertising revenue and Google gets the same percentage of that. So for $125 million, it's probably nailed down many, many times more future revenue. This will turn out to be a pretty cheap business acquisition for them.

Author's Guild Settlement Insta-Blogging (James Grimmelmann, The Laboratorium)

The issue is that this is a class-action settlement requiring judicial approval to bind all authors. It's practically impossible for anyone else to take advantage of Google's terms without filing suit to obtain a similar class-binding order. Individual license negotiation -- the route that Google considered and rejected when it started the project -- is utterly infeasible. Since voluntary negotiation can't produce the result one needs to do comprehensive indexing, there's still no market for it, and this settlement therefore shouldn't prejudice future fair use claims by search engines.

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