This is the eighth part of the monetisation series. We started discussing advertising and marketing monetisation techniques, and now we’ve moved on to other areas. This post deals with licensing.

Licensing is a specialist area and requires a particularly strong brand. In the past I’ve used football teams as good case studies of licensing, but nowadays I use Angry Birds.

Angry Birds began its life less than five years ago as a mobile phone game. After several million downloads, it was licensed for Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine. Nokia and T-Mobile soon followed, with Finnair (the Finnish airline) and a pizza company afterwards. Months later, a TV series began, and in 2016 we’ll see Angry Birds in an animated film. The Angry Birds brand is versatile enough to work across so many industries.

If you are fortunate enough to have a high traffic website with a strong brand, there are a number of options available – from publishing (books, magazines, etc.) to clothing to media (film, television, etc.) The key point, is there are endless applications of using a licensing model which are suitable for a particular brand.

This is a whole area in itself, and there are specialist brand and licensing companies able to help.