8 Reasons To Implement a Content Protection and DRM Solution

For various forms of content, companies often strive to achieve maximum views and impressions, particularly when it comes to marketing materials, advertisements, social media posts, and press releases. However, there exist specific types of content for which companies seek to restrict access to only ‘authorized’ individuals or organizations. This category includes educational content, training manuals, design specifications, research reports, price sheets, financial documents, board materials, and more. Such content demands a degree of protection and control to safeguard its integrity and confidentiality.

In this article, we will elucidate eight distinct reasons why you should contemplate the adoption of a content protection and digital rights management (DRM) solution. These solutions play a pivotal role in ensuring the security and controlled access of diverse types of content.

1. To Protect Revenue Streams

Content can make money for many companies, like associations, schools, research firms, and others who publish stuff. Whether you make money by selling eBooks, research reports, training videos, or through memberships, you must keep your digital stuff safe from people who aren’t supposed to see it.

If you don’t protect your stuff, it could be easily shared, printed, copied, or given away for free, and you’ll lose money. Even if you put your stuff on a secure website or system, you’re only securing the place where the stuff is, not the stuff itself.

Good content protection and DRM software help you control who can see, share, download, or print your stuff. This means only people who pay for it can access it, so you can keep your money safe and even make more!

2. To Increase ROI and Profit

Making content that people like and that makes money from sales, subscriptions, or memberships can cost a lot. It takes a bunch of time, money, and other stuff to create. But don’t waste it! Make sure you keep your investment safe and your profits up by protecting this kind of content.

If you’re not making as much money as you think you should be or not getting the money you wanted in return, don’t blame the folks who made the content. It’s not the writers, designers, or the marketing team’s fault. It might just be that people are getting your content without paying for it. Maybe a really important research report, a regular document, or a training video accidentally ended up on a social media site. Or perhaps those licenses you sold for one person are actually being used by whole companies, which means you’re missing out on money from selling bigger licenses.

The thing is, unless you keep your content safe and in control, your customers or members might share it with others for free, and that cuts into your profits. Content protection and digital rights management software can help stop this from happening. It makes sure that only the folks who paid for your content get to see it, and it sticks to the rules you’ve set.

3. To Protect Intellectual Property (IP)

Intellectual property (IP) is a term that covers a lot of different things. It could be a patent, something with copyright, training materials, educational stuff, market reports, data you use to make decisions, price reports, and content in text, video, or audio. All of this is intellectual property, and it needs to be kept safe, controlled, and tracked.

Some people think that just registering their IP with things like patents, trademarks, or copyrights is enough to keep it safe. But that’s just the start. Registering your IP doesn’t stop hackers, pirates, competitors, or others from using your stuff without permission and sharing it.

To really protect your digital content, you need something called file-level content protection and digital rights management (DRM). This stops all sorts of people from getting into your content and leaking it.

The good news is that modern DRM solutions don’t have to be hard for the people who want to use your content. You can choose a solution that doesn’t make them download extra stuff like plugins or apps. They can access your protected content through a secure custom-made portal, a learning system, an online store, an association management system, a content management system, or any other system you like. It’s all about keeping your intellectual property safe and making it easy for the people who should see it.

4. To Earn More Revenue Through Multi-Tiered Subscriptions

The subscription business model is becoming more popular, and many businesses that used to sell products for a one-time “forever” purchase are switching to selling subscriptions. These subscriptions can be monthly, yearly, or for a specific period. While the subscription model has its advantages over one-time sales, there are some important steps to take if you want to make more money. One of these steps is offering different subscription levels and prices.

If you provide various subscription levels with different prices and unique services or options for each level, you can increase your revenue. If you don’t offer these pricing options, you might lose customers to competitors who already do.

When you sell content as part of a subscription, you can control access by setting time limits that match the subscription period. However, there are other ways to manage access using Digital Rights Management (DRM) controls. For a lower-priced subscription, you can limit the number of files a subscriber can access, control how many times they can open or print your content, or restrict access to just one device or IP address. For a higher-priced subscription, you can provide access to more files and allow users to view the content on multiple devices, and so on.

By using an advanced DRM solution, you can customize your subscription plans with different DRM controls for each subscription level. This flexibility helps you cater to the needs of different customers and maximize your revenue potential.

5. To Gain More Members and Membership Revenue

Many businesses, including associations and non-profit organizations, offer valuable content to attract new members and increase their membership numbers. However, once these members access and download the content they want, they may decide not to renew their membership or cancel it altogether. Alternatively, some people might sign up for a less expensive single-user membership and then share their login details with friends, colleagues, or others from their organization. This sharing means you miss out on potential revenue.

This loss of members and membership revenue can be avoided by implementing a content protection and DRM solution. Such a solution allows you to protect individual content files and apply different DRM rules for various membership types. For instance, you could enforce strict policies like limiting access to one device and no downloads for individual members who pay a smaller fee. Meanwhile, you could offer more lenient policies, such as allowing access on ten devices and unlimited downloads, for corporate-level members. You can even introduce additional subscription tiers for both individual and corporate memberships.

Remember that if you leave your content unprotected for one member, they can easily download, copy, and potentially share it with thousands of others. By safeguarding your content and applying different access controls for different types of members, you can actually increase your revenue from your valuable content.

6. To Restrict Unauthorized Access 

Content such as trade secrets, design specs, board documents, price lists, internal manuals, and other confidential or sensitive types of content are designed to only be seen by a specific audience and perhaps for only a limited time. This type of content can be highly prone to unauthorized sharing, insider theft, or other type of digital leaks. A digital rights management (DRM) solution can help you protect this type of content from potential threats as you can grant access to only the specified audience with certain restrictions placed on the content (no printing, no copying, no sharing) or certain limits imposed on the user (device limits, IP address limits, open limits). You can also control the access with expiry dates or revoke access at any time if you suspect any fraud or malfeasance.

7. To Prevent Password Sharing 

Many people believe that protecting their content with a strong password will keep it safe from unauthorized access. However, even the toughest passwords can be easily shared with others, allowing anyone with that password to gain access. According to a report by Yubico in 2019, two out of three individuals share passwords with colleagues to access accounts.

The most effective way to tackle password sharing is to implement Digital Rights Management (DRM). A comprehensive DRM solution like Vitrium goes beyond standard authentication methods and lets content owners have precise control at the file level, assigning access rights to individuals or groups. This granular control includes things like setting limits on the number of devices, IP addresses, print access, and even restricting access based on location (like country and state).

For instance, imagine you’ve given a recent subscriber access with a one-device limit to view your content. Even if that person shares their password with a friend or colleague, the second person won’t get access because of the limit you’ve set. If you choose not to have such strict limits, you can still refer to detailed user activity logs in your DRM software. These logs provide information about who’s accessing your content, from which IP address, using which device, and more.

Good DRM solutions also offer detailed analytics reports that let you dig deeper. You can see which users spend the most time with your content, what pages they’ve read, how long they’ve watched a video, and much more. This way, you have a better understanding of how your content is being used and who your most engaged users are.

8. To Prevent Content Piracy 

Digital piracy continues to pose an ongoing threat to all types of content, regardless of its format. Back in the days of the second generation of cellular networks (2G), when data transmission systems couldn’t handle complex data like videos, piracy was rampant. For some, the primary motive behind piracy was to access expensive content without paying for it. Others were driven by the desire to possess and store files on their local hard drives.

With advancements in technology, such as cloud storage, improved streaming capabilities, and widespread access to broadband internet and 4G devices, many experts believed that piracy would decline. It appeared that even pirates might prefer subscribing to content services like Netflix for a reasonable monthly fee rather than dealing with the costs and hassles of storing large amounts of data locally. Consequently, numerous content providers adopted the subscription model, leading to the growth of subscription-based businesses.

However, the proliferation of content subscriptions has resulted in users having to subscribe to multiple apps to access the content they desire. In many cases, this means spending as much as they did before, if not more. This situation has rekindled the motivation for piracy. According to estimates from The Global Innovation Policy Center, global online piracy costs the U.S. economy a substantial $29.2 billion in lost revenue annually.

To safeguard your content from pirates, it’s crucial to employ robust security measures. These include military-grade encryption and various DRM controls such as device limits, IP address restrictions, location-based restrictions, print limitations, expiry dates, and more. Additionally, monitoring and analyzing how your content is being used can provide valuable insights and complement the protection and control measures you’ve implemented. Protecting your content and understanding its usage are both essential in the battle against piracy.

In conclusion, implementing a Content Protection and DRM solution is not merely a prudent choice; it’s a strategic necessity for content creators and distributors in today’s digital ecosystem. With the persistent specter of unauthorized access and piracy, investing in DRM technology becomes an essential step toward ensuring long-term success and sustainability in the digital content landscape. Protecting your content and revenue streams while maximizing profitability becomes more achievable with the right DRM solution by your side.