by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Do members REALLY own the content on Active Rain?
I asked that question some 13-14 months ago, wondering whether the hours I invested would be worthwhile. I was satisfied with the explanation that the content was, indeed, the members’ property.
Move.com attempted to buy Active Rain, it balked, and conversations about a future revenue model led the idea of syndicating the user content to the mainstream media. Again, the question of who owns the content arose- the answer was identical to the 2006 answer; the members own their content.
Justin Smith (aka Damion Foxworthy) wrote a satirical post, which won the People’s Choice Award, in the Odysseus Medal competition, about “selling” his Active Rain profile. Justin, through diligent weblogging and contribution to the community, has amassed some 100,000 points on Active Rain. The entry was cross-posted on Active Rain and generated an overwhelming response from the membership in the comments section. As usual, I “read too much into” this comment from Top Rainmaker, Jon Washburn:
Great post Justin,
I sat reading it thinking, “Great, how should I handle this. I probably have to zero out the points on this profile now. But man, whoever bought Justin’s blog is going to be pissed.”
I think you all are right and we need to think through this issue and put some type of formal policy in place.
Did you catch that? He said that he would “probably have to zero out the profile”. This means that while Justin has ownership of the points, he has no right to transfer them. The points were a by-product of the contributed content. Ergo, the content is not really “owned” by the members, in the purest definition of the word ownership (the content can’t be transferred).
The policy being considered strips the most important right of “ownership” from the members and releases it to the Company. While the Company can lease the content to a third-party news source, for the implied quid pro quo of SEO, the only profiting that will be done will be by the Company.
I’m okay with that, too. I’m willing to relinquish my content ownership to the Company for the benefit it gives me. BUT…there is no member-owned content, as defined by the right to transfer property.
Active Rain is to Web 2.0 what Vegas is to adult recreation; what happens there, stays there.
David G says:
Just devil’s advocate here but wouldn’t points be derivative works produced by Active Rain, i.e. not ‘the content’ which is member owned and transferable? Interesting topic either way; AR is fascinating in that it straddles both platform and community.
November 19, 2007 — 9:47 pm
Brian Brady says:
Good observation, David.
Points could be the currency by which that content is valued; if that currency is not transferable, then the content is truly owned by the Company. Points on Gather.com are redeemable for Border’s gift cards so there is value there.
AR is truly fascinating; a case study in social networking for the B-school grads of 2015
November 19, 2007 — 9:52 pm
Todd Carpenter says:
So the solution is to try to sell your content, not the points. Offer to sell all the content you’ve ever posted there. The new owner could then repost all of it and get the points. Then they can use the points for valuable upgrades to first class on Southwest Airlines.
November 20, 2007 — 12:19 am
Jay Thompson says:
I posted on AR back in Sept 2006 that I was putting my points on eBay. It was a joke. Some took it seriously. I got more than one off-line comment that I was “corrupting the whole system”.
November 20, 2007 — 7:12 am
Brian Brady says:
I remember that post, Jay.
Todd offers a great solution but the challenge is that blogging points are limited to 1000/week; it would take 1-2 years to get back up to the ranking. All the SEO benefits would be lost, too.
If I can alter a Facebook or MySpace profile, why not an AR profile?
November 20, 2007 — 7:36 am
Tom Burris says:
Some people seem to skyrocket up in points really fast. Yet, I haven’t found a lot to read from them. AR should consider lowering the value of some actions and raising the value of featured posts and/or highly active commented posts. Driving better articles is in their best interest!!
November 20, 2007 — 8:36 am
Tom Townsend says:
Interesting. The content that we post on AR, we think is top notch. However, due to the lax rules on points, we see that many on AR game the systems and post nothing but CRAP. I sent an email to their help desk suggesting that they need to overhaul the system. Of course I could not help but point out that their recent loss of a sale, may have been related to this.
If you look at the Tampa area for example. Drill down and you will see that the top 3 or 4 people that AR promotes as being number 1-4 in their areas , have not contributed any content in months. In fact the number 2, is out of business. And the now number one slot is owned by an agent that just posts daily statistics on how many listings her Broker has. Nothing useful to the community that I can see. If you try to put some constructive criticism their way they bite your head off.
November 21, 2007 — 9:08 am
Kaye Thomas says:
Since AR did away with the moderators there seems to be even more “junk” posts then before..and certainly many of the “featured” posts are not the high quality they once were..
It’s possible that many of the better bloggers have decided that they want to keep their “content” on outside blogs rather then take a chance on losing it should AR sell or change direction.
November 22, 2007 — 9:32 am
Mary Pope-Handy says:
AR did away with moderators? I didn’t think so.
I agree that a lot of the posts are JUNK. One guy just does links to his podcasts in which he recites the market numbers. ZZZZ. No insightful commentary. Information isn’t automatically knowledge!
Brian, this is a great post of yours – as always!
December 1, 2007 — 4:18 pm