Our comments and trackback policy You Link We Follow, You Comment We Promote

GumGum, an online content licensing service has raised $1.2 million in its first round of funding. The round was led by First Round Capital and CrossCut Ventures. With the infusion of funds Howard Morgan and Brian Garrett joins the company’s Board of Directors.

GumGum is a unique service that is trying to solve the problem of content licensing on the web. Licensing content offline is easy as it is licensed for a fixed period of time. However content on the web is licensed for an unlimited period of time i.e its licensed for ever. This situation presents a terrible problem, how do you determine the licensing cost when you don’t know who is using your content and how often.

This is where GumGum enters the scene, the service allows content creators to track the usage of their digital content (photos, videos and audio) and enable them to charge the users on a per use or ad supported basis. GumGum’s initial version was built on Flash but that had many problems. Most specifically it failed to display the digital content on the user’s website when GumGum’s servers went down. GumGum has now resolved this issue by launching a non flash version of their technology. The new version displays the content even when GumGum’s servers are down and has no delayed page loading issues. GumGum has experienced torrid growth with the release of the new version and just after 60 days of its launch in private beta the service is now tracking 300 million licensed views per month.

GumGum’s usage based licensing technology is continued to get validation from industry giants. The company has recently licensed its technology to MTV Europe and Gawker Media, which owns blogs such as ValleyWag, Jezebel, io9, Gizmodo etc. Nick Denton the founder of Gawker Media has said in a statement:

GumGum reduces our photo-licensing costs and still allows Gawker to publish high-quality photos from a number of photo agencies.