Licensing media for the Internet finally makes sense.

Offline, content is licensed for a finite period of time to a predictable audience. Online, content lives forever and usage is unknown. This begs the question: How do you fairly monetize a license when circulation is unpredictable? GumGum distributes, tracks and monetizes every view a piece of online content receives.

Via TechCrunch:

Image piracy runs rampant on the Internet, of course. Blogger Perez Hilton was sued for stealing images of celebrities, and we’ve had (ridiculous) charges leveled at us as well. And don’t forget the recent Lane Hartwell debacle.

Attributor, a Silicon Valley startup, helps content owners track their intellectual property to find examples of infringement. But until now, no one has really thought about a better way to license content on the Internet, so that both large and tiny publishers have an incentive to avoid simply stealing stuff.

That’s where GumGum comes in. Images today are generally licensed for a flat fee, exclusively or non-exclusively. GumGum founders Ophir Tanz and Ari Mir think a better way is to charge for impressions, or on an advertising-supported basis. But tracking image impressions isn’t trivial, so they first had to build a platform to do that.

It seems that there is interest in providing a model for providing income for photographers, and that’s a good thing. It will get better when the images get better, and that may take some time as well as some courting from startups like this. Take a look and think about how this may work for you.