This feature has been written in partnership with Threes.

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Threes: Helping publishers retake control of their content and find new revenue streams

Publishers are losing vast amounts of value as their content is reused and republished without authorisation. New technology is emerging to help them identify that usage at scale, turning hidden losses into fresh licensing and revenue opportunities.

A publisher’s content is its lifeblood. It is the differentiator and source of attention, revenue, and audiences. At the same time, the nature of digital publishing means other publishers and competition can – deliberately or otherwise – take or clone that content in whichever form for their own benefit.

It is all too easy to lose track of where your content ends up. That is especially true as the ease of cloning or otherwise republishing has increased. The internet is a wilderness and, as your content slips away into the ether, so too does the opportunity to monetise and benefit from it.

Jared Cooperman and John Peters are co-founders at Threes (also known as ThreesAI), a full-service licensing platform. Cooperman explains: “You can't charge for usage of your content or maintain its premium notoriety, when you can't even identify where it's used 95% of the time.

“It sounds obvious in hindsight, but that is the current state of the market. Brand protection isn't binary either – most​ agents claim to protect publisher brands, but that is the state of usage for all of their current publisher partners.”

That issue has been exacerbated by the rise of social-first platforms and social networks. These often incentivise if not outright reward reuse or remixing content. As Cooperman explains, very often that is not done on purpose: "Legitimate companies want to be abiding by fair use.”

However, given the scale of the problem – even when done without malicious intent – it puts a tremendous burden on publishers to seek out and enforce licensing rules. Cooperman says that, in his experience, some publishers have internal Slack channels where violations of licensing standards are shared from their personal surfing. That’s a time consuming process – and a drop in the ocean when it comes to the scale of the problem.

Cooperman explains: “[Publishers] might find and convert some usage (several per month), but it's impossible to find thousands of companies that way.

“Instagram has over 150 million users in the US alone, and over 2 million advertisers each month. In order to identify content usage we need to be searching in the right places for publisher IP, and doing so constantly. It's a never-ending pursuit that requires specialized expertise.”

New solutions to new issues

That overall issue has been heightened, and brought to the fore, by the rapid development and deployment of LLMs trained upon publishers’ content without authorisation. While that has led to some licensing agreements between big tech companies and publishers, too often that depends on the publishers having oversight of the process and awareness of unauthorised use.

Happily, while new tech might be exacerbating the issue, it is also being utilised to solve it. Threes, for example, is using proprietary AI to tackle the issue of finding unlicensed content at scale. In doing so, its partnerships with major tech and social platforms empowers publishers to retake control of the unauthorized at their discretion. That helps maintain the primacy and premium nature of the publisher’s content, allowing them to retain peak monetisation opportunities around it. 

More importantly, that then works with the rest of Threes’ offering to discover more opportunities for licensing. 

Noting that performance marketing spend is growing rapidly, and that brands are always hungry to appear alongside premium content, Cooperman says: “Many digitally native budgets don't really want to buy advertising, they want to buy customers. We help brands solve that problem directly - proving return on ad spend (ROAS) improvement. Our campaigns have improved ROAS typically by between 30 – 70%.”

As part of that process, Threes team and tools provide a comprehensive overview of the publisher’s stock of content, and its licensing potential. Noting that the team has never seen less than 90% unlicensed content, even when partnered with existing licensing companies, Cooperman says many publishers are surprised to see that a significant portion of unlicensed usage is frequently from mid-market or enterprise businesses.     

He explains: “We will leverage our platform to provide an assessment of how many companies are using your IP in a commercial setting (largely revenue opportunities, but some bad-actors as well). If a publisher wants to share their existing licensing business we can give a licensed percentage of the total.”

Three’s approach has led to investment from a variety of media and commerce businesses. 

Current partners include People Inc, ADWEEK, Mansueto Ventures and many more. Threes is currently selectively onboarding its next batch of partners. 

Mike Beyman, Head of Strategy & Business Operations at ADWEEK said “Threes has been the key to the transformation of our licensing business.  In less than a year, they’ve helped us take a revenue line that had remained flat – and more than double it – turning it into a growth driver for the business” 

Patrick Hainault, VP Corporate Business Development for Mansueto Ventures, said “Adding Threes’ tools to our licensing arsenal made an immediate difference to our bottom line. They tailored the program to match our needs – fully in sync with how we already work and what we do best.”

Different perspectives on the same issue

Of course, while licensing and unauthorised use of content has been around for decades, it has been exacerbated by recent tech developments. Cooperman believes that Threes is approaching the problem on a different tack than the incumbent and legacy licensing operators, many of whom have been around since before the advent of digital commerce. He explains:

“We come from an e-comm background and are leveraging the newest technology - everything from GTM sales enablement, best in class data for pricing optimization and account targeting, to quickly setting up digital storefronts for physical awards or plaques, instead of mail-in PDF forms. 

“We have learned a lot about the incumbents’ successes, and have implemented many of the things we have seen them do well into our own standard procedures.”

As part of that fresh look, the team is keen to stress that the value of premium publishers’ content online should not be undersold or understated. That was, after all, one of the initial mistakes made when advertising began migrating towards online. Instead, through their licensing and performance marketing offerings, Threes aims to connect worthy publishers that invest in content with brands that appreciate being associated with them.

Cooperman says: “It's pretty intuitive at a high-level – a publisher with premium credibility speaking positively about a brand or giving them an award builds trust and drives better purchase behavior – whether it's a roofing company or a lipstick brand. 

“We leverage our e-commerce experience to drive performance. It's a great add-on product for publishers who are fighting declining SEO traffic because social offers limitless inventory and free traffic (paid for by the advertiser) to the publisher website.”

Digital publishing is still providing new opportunities for premium publishers that recognise the inherent value of their content. From ensuring that all usage of that content is licensed, to joining the dots between that content and brands, there is still an awful lot of headroom for savvy publishers to maximise their content’s potential.