I am quite passionate about the Internet, and as such I am always coming up with new ideas for websites and online businesses. At the same time I know that focus is vital if you want to achieve success, and I already have a couple of projects going on, so most of the time I just let those ideas site on the back burner.
Thinking about it, though, I figured that it could be interesting to post the ideas on the blog. If nothing else we’ll discuss about business models and making money on the Internet. There is also the chance that someone will like the idea and implement it, or adapt it slightly to launch something similar. If you do and end up making millions I will only be happy!
Anyway today I want to share an idea that I had back in 2008. I even purchased a domain and created a prototype for the business, but it never took off as I didn’t have time to put on the project.
The Idea
As a web publisher, I know how annoying it is to have scrapers copying my content and publishing it all over the web. In fact this practice is not only annoying, but it can be costly too. If people can find your content on other websites they might not visit yours, and excessive amounts of duplicate content might also hurt your search engine rankings, thus reducing the amount of organic traffic you’ll receive.
Unfortunately monitoring who is stealing your content and taking action to solve it would consume far too much time for the average web publisher, and here is where this business would come. It would be a company offering “copyright protection services for web publishers.”
How It Would Work
The service would have three main steps:
1. Content Theft Monitoring: Once the web publisher becomes a client, the company would start monitoring the web to see what websites are stealing the content of the client’s website. Ideally the company would develop a proprietary technology to track the copyright violations effectively.
2. Content Takedown: Upon identifying the content scrapers, the company would take the necessary actions to take it down. On this step you would have a hierarchy of measures. First of all the site owner would be contacted in a friendly way. If that didn’t work, the hosting company would be contacted with a DMCA. If even that didn’t work, the company would study with the client the possibility of taking proper legal action.
3. Reporting: Every month the company would provide the client with a report. It would include all the instances of copyright violation found, and percentage of the violations that were already solved, and so on.
Where is the money?
The business model is pretty simple. In exchange for the services mentioned above the client would pay a monthly fee. The company could have different tiers of service, depending on the size of the client’s website.
For example, a personal blog with fewer than 500 pages could be charged $49 monthly for the service, while a mainstream content portal with over 10,000 pages would need to pay $199 monthly, because tracking all the violations here would consume a lot more resources.
Challenges
The main challenged I foresee with this business is to convince web publishers that they are actually losing money due to content scrapers. If you could build a couple of strong case studies proving that by removing duplicate the revenues of the website actually increased you would be in a good position to sell the service.
Another problem is the content takedown process. You would need to have at least one lawyer aboard to manage this part of the business.
Over To You
What do you guys think about this idea? If any of you want to give it a shot I already have a pretty good domain name (paid $1,000 for it) and a basic website design ready to go.
