What is a Content Licensing Agreement?
To get back to basics, content licensing allows companies to republish or repurpose published material through a legal agreement often referred to as a copyright license. It’s a flexible solution for companies looking to add to their digital magazines, blog posts or other content initiatives.
Why Organizations May Use Content Licensing
Why might an organization consider content licensing? Companies may use licensed content in a variety of ways. Media companies may supplement their news content with licensed materials. Marketing companies may use this kind of material as part of a content marketing solution to showcase high-quality material at more consistent intervals. Educators may use newspaper articles as curriculum tools for English language learners.
Licensing in Marketing
For marketing, what exactly is the benefit? Maybe a marketing team at your company has quietly discussed it. Maybe someone on your team has said something along the lines of, “Our company blog is on life support. It really needs help. Like right now. The stuff we’re posting isn’t really connecting with people. In fact, it’s connecting with no one. What are we going to do?”
You’re not alone. The concept of content marketing (which can include a blog content strategy) is straightforward. It’s a “strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action,” according to Content Marketing World, one of the better-known marketing events in the United States.
And the concept of content marketing has grown exponentially. Some reports say that content marketing now makes up 26% of the total marketing budget for companies in the B2B sector, and 38% of those companies plan to increase what they spend year over year.
A blog or “resource page” on your company website is the perfect platform to regularly interact with the public in a way that’s not intrusive but still very informative. People learn about what your company does in a laid-back sort of way, on their own time and at their leisure.
The best digital marketers understand why this informative content is so important for their audiences across all platforms. This type of content curation sounds simple enough — until you have to actually do it. And by that I mean write creative and educational posts, week after week. Curating content for newsletters and emails can be tailored to readers' preferences and interests, providing them with a personalized reading experience.
Alternatively, when working with unlicensed content, all information taken from elsewhere must be cited, with no clarity on how much of the article can actually be published safely. So, having your own in-house published content coupled with licensed content can help continue to impress your readers.
The Basics of Content Licensing
What if we said there was a way to acquire really tightly-written pieces on topics that would resonate with your audience, crafted by exceptionally talented writers. Would you explore it? Would the notion of easing your workload by choosing stories on any topic and written by a global staff be appealing?
That’s where “content licensing” comes into play. And that’s what our team at The New York Times Licensing Group (NYTLicensing) does best. Envision a group of editors that curates meaningful content (stories, images and videos) that were originally produced for The Times, but also perfectly fit the editorial needs of your blog or other communication channels. These pieces can help you unpack complicated topics related to your business, thereby helping you attract new audiences and drive brand loyalty.
These days, companies are increasingly featuring fascinating stories, images and videos in their content marketing programs since this kind of content has a proven track record of attracting, entertaining and educating curious consumers. NYTLicensing has that content — libraries full of it — which can help you position your company as a thought leader on practically any subject.
What is a Content Licensing Agreement?
A content licensing agreement is a legal contract that grants usage rights to a specific party. This contract will be between the rightsholder and the company seeking to use the content. The agreement will outline the fees and how the content can be used.
Licensed Content Misconceptions
Buying Content is the Same as Licensing Content
Buying content can include licensing, but could also include hiring freelance writers to create bespoke content. Oftentimes, freelancers may be content marketers and not industry experts, making it difficult to get them up to speed on your products or offerings. Buying content can also be very costly since each post is custom-created for you. Content licensing cuts these costs down by allowing you to reuse articles that have already been edited and fact-checked. With a licensing agreement, you are essentially republishing a reprint of content that has already been created but a publisher. Licensing content allows you to pick and choose which content you want to feature on your website and you pay for the right to include each piece according to the terms of your contract.
Licensing Content Delivers Less Value than Content Marketing Assets Produced In-House
Licensed content gives you access to world-renowned thought leaders and experts at a fraction of the price. In fact, 55% of decision-makers are leveraging thought leadership content to determine which organizations they work with. By showcasing world-renowned writers and thinkers, your company can build valuable relationships with prospects and customers.
Licensing Content Will Diminish Your Authority
Using a reputable source like The New York Times will actually boost your credibility. Having new voices and content on your site brings in a fresh voice and allows you to educate your audience on topics your own team may not be qualified to talk about. Additionally, curating news content allows your team to deliver updates by world-renowned experts in a timely manner. Curated content can establish your brand as a thought leader and help encourage leads to explore brand-generated content.
Content Licensing is the Same as Guest Posting
A guest blogger usually submits content to your site. This can be a valuable way to get additional voices on your site. However, posts from influential industry experts may be harder to attain. With content licensing you can choose what content you want to pay for and the caliber of writers that you want to associate with your brand.
Republishing Content is Okay if an Employee wrote it
Just because someone from your company wrote a piece of content does not mean that your company has the rights to it. Sharing a link to this article is usually okay, provided the content doesn’t fall behind a paywall. However, other use cases, such as posting the article to your website, are not generally permitted under copyright law. Using copyrighted material usually requires written permission from a publication.
I'm Not Directly Profiting Off the Content, so It's Fair Use
There are many misconceptions about fair use law and how it’s applied. Fair law does not typically grant someone the rights to copy entire articles or books, even if there is no commercial profit.
Licensing Content is Stealing
Content licensing is a legal agreement between the publication and your company. As long as your company uses the content in the scope of the license, it is legal to reuse the material.
Content Licensing is Complicated
Content licensing doesn’t always have to be a time-consuming process. With rights licensing partners, such as NYTLicensing, you can gain access to a vast range of titles, so you can reuse and republish content for a wide variety of use cases.
The Benefits of Content Licensing
For content marketers looking to license content, they can find the following benefits:
1. Increase Open and Click-Through Rates
Let’s face it: You have to give your audience a reason to open your emails, read your newsletter or make exploring your blog a regular habit. You want them to learn, and ultimately return. Our content can help you achieve higher-than-average open and click-through rates. For example, the average open rate for the best-performing newsletters of The Times (such as Smarter Living, Well and Morning Briefing) is 52-83%. The industry average is 30%. Why is our open rate so high? Because our content commands attention.
2. Create More Touchpoints and Drive More Sales
According to Salesforce, it takes 6-8 touch points between a customer and a brand before the customer makes a purchase. We can help you provide a steady stream of credible, well-written, highly vetted content, written, photographed or produced by some of the best storytellers around, to give you more opportunities to engage with customers and potential customers. These constant touchpoints help drive more sales.
3. Save Time and Money
The best part is that using licensed content saves you lots of time and money on content development and production. (Here’s a secret: Producing a story for The Times is expensive.) It’s more economical for you to use licensed, world-class pieces from our journalists than it is to produce content of similar depth, breadth and quality.
4. Leverage Trusted Content from Thought Leaders
By outsourcing your content, you can leverage the expertise of industry thought leaders. 55% percent of decision-makers are reading a company’s content to vet vendors. Thought leadership content can help your business establish credibility while boosting brand reputation, helping you further engage with your target audience and key decision-makers.
5. Improve Traffic
Licensed content can help to improve your overall SEO because the more pages you add to a site, the more pages will be available for indexing. This can lead to overall traffic growth because not only does it give Google more opportunity to rank you for high-volume keywords, it also keeps users on your site for longer periods of time.
6. Avoid Copyright Violations
There is always a risk when using unlicensed content. Copyright violations can reflect poorly on your company's reputation.
The Laws Around Repurposing Content
Through content licensing, companies have access to a long list of publications and can republish and repurpose content in accordance with the terms of the license. This copyright license gives marketers the rights they need to reuse published material in their own content marketing initiatives.
Since a content license is a legal agreement between organizations, it allows companies to ethically source their content pieces. It’s an easy solution to get all your content needs in a copyright-compliant manner. This reduces your risk of accidentally publishing copyrighted materials without permission.
How Does a Licensing Agreement Work?
Copyright permission is usually granted through a licensing agreement that is signed by the copyright licensee and copyright owner of the content. To start the agreement process, the copyright owner will likely ask the licensee some additional questions to clarify what permission is being sought (such as which pieces of content, type of usage, platforms, length of time, etc.) and come up with the licensing agreement that outlines terms and conditions of the copyright license – including any applicable fees.
Content Licensing Best Practices
1. Use Different Forms of Licensed Content
It is important to know that there are several types of content available to license across a range of formats. Content licensing is not only available for articles. One can also license news content, thought leadership, website content, ready-to-publish guides, recipes, news photography, videos for content marketing and more.
2. Tailor Your Content Licensing to Reach Your Audience
The content you should license will depend on your business goals and target audience, too. For example, if you are looking to foster trust with your audience you might consider licensing thought leadership articles from reputable publishers, like The Economist or Harvard Business Review. Alternatively, if you are looking to add fresh voices to your content strategy with expertly produced lifestyle pieces that you are unable to create on your own, you might look to license guides from NYT Cooking or audio clips from Well Minute by The New York Times.
3. Pay Attention to the Content Licensing Agreement Terms
In all cases, it is important to pay attention to the license terms in the agreement that you enter into with the copyright owner. Not all publishers or copyright owners offer the same permissions. By sticking to the conditions of the usage, including things like specifications for attribution, you will ensure that you are fully within your rights to make the best use of the content.
Content Licensing Examples
NYTLicensing makes journalism from The New York Times available in an array of formats to help organizations cultivate new audiences and expand their editorial range. In addition, there are many different examples of content marketing success, as well as licensing success that companies have seen due to the help of NYTLicensing.
Driving Brand Credibility with AdvisorStream
AdvisorStream is an award-winning marketing platform for financial advisors. They leveraged licensed content from The New York Times to expand their content offerings. By doing so, they were able to increase their views to licensed content by 200% and improve lead capture on their platform by 260%.
Driving Sales with Content Licensing for American City Business Journals
NYTLicensing helped American City Business Journals (ACBJ) bolster their original reporting with The New York Times News Service Complete. ACBJ was able to implement an elegant, “one-size-fits-all” editorial content solution across their wide variety of niche business publications and drive a network wide increase in digital subscriptions of 75%.
Helping Estadão with our Big Ideas Content Package
In 2019, NYTLicensing licensed our Big Ideas package to Estadão which enabled them to host an event with themed conversations that tackled current issues in Brazil. It attracted luminaries from all disciplines and resonated with a vast audience.
Accessing and Licensing Digital Content
Since digital channels are important for today’s content marketers, educators, and media teams, understanding how to license digital content is essential. Licensing digital material will involve getting written permission from the copyright holder. This may be a publisher, author, or rights licensing agency.
First, your team will need to determine what channels you would like to distribute this content, so you can determine what permissions you will need. For more information, check out our guide on how to get copyright permission.
Common Questions About Content Licensing
Content Licensing Basics
What is third-party licensing?
Third-party content licensing is related to how companies or people can use intellectual property from a third party. A copyright license will outline how this intellectual property can be used.
Are copyright and licensing the same thing?
Licensed content can come in the form of exclusive rights or non-exclusive rights. When exclusive rights are granted, some of the copyright rights are often transferred to another party. However, when non-exclusive rights are given, the rightsholder usually retains the copyright rights for the work.
What are the differences between copyright and usage rights?
Usage rights allow a person or organization to reuse copyrighted work according to specific guidelines, usually outlined in a copyright license. A copyright holder will often retain the original rights to this work.
One of our employees was featured in a publication. Can we republish this?
Just because your employee or company was featured does not give the rights to share or republish the article. Prior to doing so, you must contact the publisher to confirm availability and formally get copyright permission. Reposting articles without the proper permission can result in copyright infringement.
What are the differences between content syndication and content licensing?
You may have heard “content syndication” and “content licensing” being used interchangeably. While the terms are related, they are not the same thing.
Content syndication refers to the distribution of original content to third-party websites or print publications. Writers and brands typically offer their content, at little to no cost, to syndication networks. Those networks then aggregate the content to the websites on behalf of the writer, for free or a low cost-per-click. The advantage to their writer is that it is a quick way to broaden their reach and grow their audience. For example, if you have a business that focuses primarily on stock markets, financial content syndication can help you reach that audience, as well as expand into other related topics. While this is enticing, it also means that the writer has very little control over where their content is republished.
Alternatively, content licensing refers to a formal agreement between a publisher and a third party who pays for specific rights to republish a piece of content. As a writer, allowing the publisher to retain the rights to your content keeps it exclusive and ensures that its redistribution (if allowed) ensures that it will reach a targeted audience.
As a third party, sourcing content either through content syndication or content licensing will help you boost your output and fill your content marketing channels with the material. However, by licensing content from a reputable source, you will ensure that the content is of higher quality and more relevant to your audience than the content you might get on a syndication network. The effects of this are an elevated brand reputation and a deeper relationship with your audience.
Obtaining Licensed Content
How do you get licensed content?
Organizations can acquire licensed content by working together with a published or rights licensing agency. Companies will first need to determine what content they need and how they will need to use it. These companies will then negotiate permissions with the publisher. NYTLicensing offers solutions for different industries such as fintech content licensing, health content licensing and travel content licensing.
Alternatively, many rights licensing companies such as NYTLicensing, offer more comprehensive licensing solutions, so many permissions don't need to be negotiated individually.
What is the role of a licensing agency and what do content licensing companies do??
In cases where the copyright owner or publisher does not handle their own licensing and permissions, a licensing agency acts as the bridge between the publisher and the licensee. They work with the licensee to help find the right content for their audience and boost sales and brand awareness. We have a guide on how to get a copyright license with one of these agencies.
What's involved in a content licensing agreement?
A content licensing agreement is a contract between two parties, where the licensee agrees to use a piece of content (such as an award logo, a quote, or a video) for a specified period of time. These agreements typically utilize certain conditions and specify if the content will be used on a digital platform or in print.
What types of content can be licensed?
All media types are available for licensing, including in-depth articles, listicles, guides, infographics, videos, photos, and more. These content types may fall under a wide range of verticals too. Examples include news analysis, opinion, business news, technology insights, health articles, financial news, entertainment industry news and more. In terms of images, this may include more general topics, such as portrait photography or obituary photos. Alternatively, there are some specific photo essays and award-winning photojournalism from relevant recent and future events, such as COVID-19 or the 2022 Winter Olympics. There are a range of topics captured both in text and in photography to suit your business needs. Journalism used in marketing can be an effective tool to better connect with customers while providing value.
Buying Licensed Content
Are there costs involved with content licensing?
Content licensing is typically fee-based and will depend on the publisher. Cost factors include the type of content you want to license, how it’s being used, and the duration of time.
How much does it cost to license content?
There is no standard pricing associated with licensing content. Pricing will typically depend on the publication and the specific use case. To learn more about pricing related to The New York Times and our partner publications, please contact our sales team.
Content Licensing with The New York Times
NYTLicensing offers content feeds curated from all Times verticals, including the arts, business, culture, entertainment, food, health, media, science, style, technology and travel. There’s more, but it’s a long list.
Interested in content in other languages for the classroom, training employees, or for your global content marketing strategy? We’ve got you covered there, too.
Since content can be a valuable tool to grow your business and brand, it's important to license credible and trustworthy content. With a license from NYTLicensing, you get access to articles from The New York Times. In addition, NYTLicensing also represents a variety of other respected publications, such as Harvard Business Review (on the workplace, careers and leadership), The Economist (on international affairs, business and culture), and Scientific American magazine (sharp journalism on developments in science and technology), among others.
Final Thoughts
The NYTLicensing team understands your needs because it’s rich in resources and ready to ideate with you on different ways to draw your audience. Our content strategists are versed in the latest content marketing trends. And, of course, The Licensing Group’s editorial staff is closely connected to Times journalism, enabling them to easily recommend rights-cleared content with just the right fit and cadence of stories.
So that’s what we do — and we do it quite well (and that’s supported by the fact that The Times recently won its 130th Pulitzer Prize. Not bad.) As we wrap up this post, NYTLicensing’s editors are curating something special for a company interested in some immersive travel content. Apparently, their blog is on life support, too.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is licensed content?
Licensed content is rights-cleared content, from a third party, that is being repurposed in some way. Types of licensed content might include:
- News articles
- Magazine features
- Opinion essays
- Infographics
- Photographs
- Video footage
