Hello, We are about to start commissioing content from authors to one or our websites and I am interested in payment, commissioning models others may have used as part of online publishing activity? IE is this done on a per word, per page or per article basis or combo of the 3? Or do we do it by site metrics such as views, visitors etc?

This is for quite a niche B2B market rather than "consumer" lead markets however the commissioning models may be very similar.

I'd also be interested if anyone has any commissioing contracts or templates they use specifically for website contributors to deliver?

Would be great if anyone has any advice regarding this?

Many thanks

Robert

Hi Robert

All of the models you suggest are used and I guess you should go with the one which suits your business model best e.g. are you trying to drive traffic, subscriptions, both etc. And how important is it that you own the intellectual property rights or not?

Where we pay contributors (mostly staff, but some contractors) then it has always been a fixed price, or fee, for particular deliverables. 

Journalists, however, are more used to being paid by the word. This sort of makes sense in print where space is limited but doesn't make much sense online. Twitter wouldn't be very lucrative! 

You could also try asking your question in the journalism.co.uk forum to see what they think?

Hi Robert

I have just see your post and thought you'd be interested to know about the models we have recently been working for content agreements.  These have involved one off commissions; licences of all kinds including, exclusive (where only you can use it), sole (where only you and the licensee/author can use it) and non-exclusive (where you can use it, so can the licensee/author and it can also be licensed to third parties); and assignments.  Assignments are likely to be the most attractive for your business because you get to keep the content and use it for whatever purpose you like.  You will also not need to be concerned about royalty payments. 

Using each of these models you can commission one-off pieces or a bundle of content and this would probably depend on who you were going to ask to make those contributions.  Working to a fixed price per piece will help you to budget most effectively.  And of course as you point out in your latest post, you need to retain the flexibility to re-write/edit, or to decline a piece that does not meet your spec.

Do let me know if you want a chat about contract models - my details are all on my profile.