Crowdsourcing R&D: USA Today starts licensing data for commercial use

October 24, 2011

Crowdsourcing R&D: USA Today starts licensing data for commercial use

News organizations generate lots of stories, and this body of work represents a database with value for reuse. USA Today had offered this data only for personal and noncommercial use, but now they’re open to selling it for use in some commercial projects.

The point may not be to make money directly off licenses, but rather to indirectly expand their business opportunities via crowdsourced R&D…

On Oct. 13 the USA Today developer team announced new commercial terms of use for their articles, reviews and census via its application programming interfaces (APIs).

Nieman Journalism Lab explains that this means USA Today is “offering commercial licensing of its data on a case-by-case basis. Premium licenses would remove rate limits and caps for data-hungry programs, too. That means USA Today can make money selling its data and app developers can make money using it.”

So far, commercial licenses will be granted on a case-by-case basis. No pricing has been announce yet.

In the U.K., the Guardian has been offering a similar “freemium” model for access to content via its Open Platform services since last year. They also recently hosted a two-day internal hackathon to spur development ideas by their staff.

How much revenue can this bring in? In a GigaOm post, Mathew Ingram observed that direct licensing revenues may not be significant, but “it allows for experimentation outside the traditional confines of the publication itself—and that can generate valuable ideas and feedback.”

In other words, commercial licensing of a news organization’s content via an API is a way of outsourcing R&D creativity, to take advantage of expertise and perspectives that are hard to find within most news organizations. Also, developers are more likely to do their best work when they stand to earn a profit. Of course, many news organizations lack the internal tech capabilities to develop their own APIs. But perhaps that represents a market opportunity for developers to assess content databases and develop APIs on behalf of news organizations?

The News for Digital Journalists blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.