Description
On the internet, competition is rife, with millions of websites pursuing billions of “surfers” (i.e. website visitors/users) worldwide. The more surfers who “hit” (i.e. visit) a website, the more “traffic” it generates, thus the more valuable that website becomes to advertisers, who will pay to have their advertising “banners” (i.e. window or box style advertising strips) or “pop-up” ads (as the name implies, the advert “pops-up” in a box or banner strip when a visitor hits the site) appear on the websites containing content with a high amount of traffic.
The most popular “browser” or search engine networks such as Google as well as websites such as Amazon and eBay can command huge sums for advertising banners on their home page. Choosing the right mix of content to attract visitors and to keep them coming back is therefore paramount to success.
For the website owner, whose benefit this contract is drafted, obtaining access to as much valuable/popular content as possible is one of its main goals to keep the “hit” rate (traffic) high by keeping visitors interested in new and varied content as well as the quality and usefulness of its core content which attracted their first visits.
The website owner would seek as wide and flexible conditions of use of the content as possible, with a free hand to change the “look and feel”, merge, modify, manage or change the way it was delivered in order to tailor it to individual markets.
On the question of fees and charges payable, it depends purely on the name and reputation of each party. If the website owner is the larger, well-known party, then it would not want to pay any fee for the licence to display and redistribute the content even though that content may attract an increase in traffic, but rather it would prefer to have the content provider pay the website owner a percentage of the revenue generated from appearing on the website owner’s network/websites.
On the other hand, if the content provider is the larger, well-known party whose content already has a well-established name and large number of regular users/followers then it would more likely seek a licence fee for the right to hosts its content (see Contract 66).
