Clickshare frequently asked questions

Q: You call Clickshare a "service," not a network. Why?

A: Clickshare is not a network (implying a physical infrastructure), but rather a network protocol (software) which operates across a physical network employing TCP/IP and HTTP. The Internet is such a network.

Clickshare's protocol provides a suite of services to publishers who adopt it. These include universal, one-ID registration, session-based user validation, user profiling (to support personalization and demographic-data collection) and user-access verification (the latter supporting per-query, per page or per "click" billing).

The Clickshare facility permits owners of proprietary content to offer it via the Internet. Clickshare customers can obtain and pay for it readily; non-Clickshare users will be unable to view the content unless they first enroll and arrange a form of payment.

But as important, Clickshare users are free to use the vast free resources of the Internet seemlessly and even jump back and forth between free and paid resources without difficulty. And Clickshare Publishing Members may provide a mix of chargeable and free content on their web sites -- some of it open to the general Internet user and some open only to Newshare users.

In this sense, Clickshare is not a technology network but a loose affiliation of content providers for billing purposes only. It has been described as a system enabling "billable hypertext links."

Q: Is there anything else out there like Clickshare?

A: Not that we know of. Unlike a relationship with a proprietary network or online service, the Clickshare Publishing Member maintains and controls the primary relationship with the end-user as well as the look and feel of content provided. Clickshare's role is as a back-end authentication and payment facilitator and -- at the Publishing Member's option -- as a context-provider for Newshare-enabled content of other unrelated Publishing Members. This later service will be provided by the Newshare Syndicate.

Q: How much does it cost for a content provider to become a part of the Clickshare service?

A: Regardless of size, there is a one-time membership fee of $1,995 for Clickshare publishing membership. With membership comes a free license to use Clickshare-enhanced server software for user registration. This fee may be paid upon enrollment or it may be debited from the Publishing Member's clearing account as a percentage of ongoing royalty payments. The Publisher Member is also charged a fee of $3 per year, payable quarterly, for each of the first 10,000 end-users who register to use Clickshare through their site (with a declining per-user fee schedule above that level). That fee may also be financed via "clickstream" royalties or commissions otherwise due Publishing Member. This per-user fee is required to finance the scaling-up of technical facilities, which depends on the total number of users in the Clickshare "universe." A Publisher with 100,000 users puts more "load" on the system than one with 100 users.

Q: How does Clickshare Corp. make money on an ongoing basis?

A: The contract between Clickshare and each Publishing Member permits Clickshare to deduct a transaction fee from the value of each unit of "clicked" information handled by the Clickshare service. This fee, like a commission, will equal 20% of the transaction amount.

Q: Exactly how is a consumer user charged for his reading, viewing or listening?

A: Clickshare is WWW-based. A user clicks to the home page of his or her Publishing Member, which might be a newspaper, a trade publisher or an Internet service provider. The user's Home Publisher may "serve" up a generic home page to all its users, or it may construct, on the fly, custom home pages for each individual member.

Publishing Members operate an Internet server equipped with the Clickshare- enhanced, UNIX-based httpd server. The user requesting a page from anywhere in the Internet universe gets it back without intervention. If it is content of another Clickshare Publishing Member, a record of the request is made in background. If the page is priced above specified levels, the user may be prompted before receiving it.

For users who are paying on a flat (subscription) basis, at the end of the month, the user's access is totaled and if the value of "clicks" exceeds the basic monthly fee to the Home Publisher, the user is billed. If it is less, the user pays only a basic fee set by the Publishing Member. The only billing and payment relationship at the consumer level is between the Publishing Member and the user.

The Publishing Member draws from or pays into a clearing account at the Clickshare corporate/technical level equal to the sum of the Publishing Member's user-member clicks -- offset against any original content that the Publishing Member has "served" to the global Clickshare system. This could be a net positive or negative number for the Publishing Member, depending how active a supplier of content the Publishing Member is. If it is positive, the Publishing Member doesn't have to charge its users a very high monthly fee to make money. If it is negative, the Publishing Member may need to raise the subscription fees.

Q:You have said that the Clickshare-enhanced server software is free under license. What is the $1,995 charge for?

A: The $1,995 is the current one-time fee for a content provider to access the Clickshare micro-transaction settlement service as a new Publishing Member. The fee opens access to the Clickshare system for all of the publisher's home-base users who have registered as Clickshare users. They do this with their home-base publisher.

The $1,995 one-time license fee does not have to be paid in a lump sum. It may be paid through a withholding of a percentage of royalty payments to the Publishing Member for "clicks" to its charged content. In this way, the Publishing Member pays nothing for the service until it begins to produce revenue.

The $1,995 fee is uniform for all sizes of Publishing Member. Those with broader, more popular content will benefit more than those with narrow, limited-interest content. Because Clickshare's form of compensation is a transaction fee which is a percentage of "click fees," Clickshare ultimately makes money when content providers sell content. That creates an incentive for Clickshare Corp. to help its members to sell content. It is a classic broker relationship.

Q: Are there any other fees?

A: Yes. Publishing Members are assessed an annual fee of $3 per user enabled. This fee is payable at the end of each quarter and is based upon the number of enabled users at the end of the period. This fee equitably spreads the technology costs of processing transactions between large publishers and small publishers.

Q: How do publishers provide content via Clickshare Corp.?

It is a misconception to think of the Publishing Member as providing content to Clickshare. We expect our Publishing Members to maintain their own content on their own Internet server (or one they purchase space on). Clickshare Corp. does two things:

· Through the Clickshare server software, we enable the content provider to track and receive royalties from users who click on content pages; and, · At the Publishing Member's option, we will provide links to the Publishing Member's content via the Newshare Syndicate service, run by Newshare Corp, parent corporation to Clickshare.

The Publishing Member retains original copyright to its own original material. The Publishing Member also grants a limited license to Newshare to create links to that content and a license to other Clickshare Publishing Members to reference and broker the sale of that content to their members at a price set by the originating Publishing Member. Clickshare makes money only when the Publishing Member sells content. In this fashion, Clickshare preserves the independence of publishers, shoulders a share of the financial risks, yet establishes a framework for sharing of information and users among publishers.

Q: What amount will the per-access User fees be, and how much will the originating publisher get?

The Clickshare service will at the outset permit 16 different pricing levels, but provides the technical capacity for thousands of pricing levels. We expect that these will range from as little as a few pennies per page for low-value-added, "commodity" to several dollars per page for exclusive, time-sensitive material. Our strategy is to keep page costs very low and broker information for which this is an appropriate price. Clickshare is capable of completing transactions for the purchase of software applets (Java programs for instance) and off-line products, as well.

Q: Do users get to approve each information purchase?

A: The Clickshare concept is for users to access content without having to decide before each "click" whether they can afford it. The Publishing Member sets the price of a page being served. The Publishing Member has complete flexibility in its agreement with users to set a price above which there will be an "approval screen" displayed before information is purchased. We anticipate that most users will commonly agree to be served information without per-item approval if the price is in the range of one dollaror less. There is little market research on this topic as it has never been feasible to sell information "by the click" at such a low fee.

Q: Do Publishing Members have the right to download and publish Clickshare-enabled materials?

A: Absolutely no. Not if you mean "publish" in the conventional sense of the printed page. Clickshare's service is not intended to handle royalty settlement for conventional print publishing. It is intended to automate the systematic use of copyrighted material on a one-time, non-commercial basis by individuals. For example, if a newspaper wishes to print a piece of Clickshare-enabled content, it must obtain copyright in a conventional fashion from the original owner. We might facilitate this process manually as a service and we intend to be compatible with variety of "ecash" payment systems which could be used to pay for print publication rights.

Q: Then what does Clickshare charge for?

A: The Clickshare service will charge the clearing account of a Publishing Member whose consumer user "clicks to" World Wide Web-accessible content. The charge is determined by the copyright-owner of the content used and is for one-time, personal use.

Q: How is the user "billed" for the reading or other use of Clickshare-enabled materials?

Records of these accesses and charges will be provided by the Clickshare service to the Publishing Member's server machine on a periodic basis, possibly as often as daily. The Publishing Member may take this data and feed it to whatever billing engine it wishes to use to bill its own members. However, we expect to recommend approved vendors for this service and we may ourselves offer a billing facility.

In keeping with our strategic goal of maintaining minimal proprietary roadblocks to the Clickshare service and inviting value-added services from other vendors, we are not specifying a billing facility. We will provide the date required to perform billing and will perform billing as an optional service upon request.

Q: What is the difference between Clickshare and Newshare?

Newshare is an editorial system for exchanging local- and topic-specific news among licensed Publishing Members and their affiliated users. Clickshare is a technology which makes concepts such as Newshare economically feasible on a broad scale. Clickshare can be used for exhange of any information (not just news) which can be formatted for acquisition "by the click" via the World Wide Web.

Newshare Corp. intends to award geographic-specific or topic-specific exclusivity to Publishing Members in exchange for their use of the Newshare name in their service. Such publishers must follow Newshare's Customer Service Objectives (CSO) and the exclusivity agreement is renewed after a specified period.

Use of the Clickshare service, which, much like any other form of common carriage, is open to any content producer willing to purchase a license to use it.

Q: Will Publishing Members who join the Clickshare service have to also rename their digital publications to include the Clickshare brand in the title?

A: No, unless they wish to be designated as a Newshare lead topic- or geographic-specific partner. We believe that information consumers rely upon a recognizable brand to assure them of ease-of-use, quality and accuracy. The phrase "newshare" conveys more precisely than any existing word the concept our service enables. Since the objective is to attract the most number of users to Clickshare-enabled content as opposed to some other service's content, a long history of consumer marketing in the free world suggests they way to do this is with a recognizable brand. That is Newshare, a registered servicemark of Newshare Corp. However, many publishers may prefer to maintain their own brand's identity and will therefore use only the Clickshare technology.

Q: Will Publishing Members be under any obligation to link their consumer users to the content of the Newshare Syndicate or other Publishing Members?

A: Not at all. However, a publisher who wishes to obtain additional revenue at no incremental cost would be well advised to "send" its users to Newshare and fellow Publishing Members for content it does not provide locally or topically. Then when its users "click" on fellow member content, they (the originating Publishing Member) receive a referral fee for enabling that "click."

Q: So the only content benefit to publishers is having access to material to use, which may or may not meet their needs or standards?

A: The aim of Newshare is not primarily to provide content for traditional publishing; it is to provide a reliable, one-stop resource (and more particularly a one bill resource) for consumers to find and obtain topic- and geographic-specific, time-sensitive information via the Internet. Clickshare and its Publishing Members enable this process, and are financially rewarded as a result, through royalties on their own works and commissions for the sale to their users of other publishers' works.

Q: Will you guarantee the accuracy of reports?

A: We cannot guarantee the accuracy of the copyrighted content of Clickshare Publishing Members any more than a newspaper can guarantee the accuracy of the work of all of its news staff. Newshare Publishing Members will be contractually obligated to meet a set of Customer Service Objectives, which will include measurements of accuracy of their content. Publishing Members who do not meet these objective standards will not received extended contracts in Newshare membership, although they will continue to be permitted to use the Clickshare technical service.

Q: Who is among Clickhare's Publishing Members?

A: See the Clickshare press releases (index) for the latest information on this.

Q: I have heard that the major online services -- America Online and Prodigy in particular -- have adopted the practice of storing Web pages of Internet publishers within their own "firewalls" and then serving their millions of users by accessing those "copies" of the real pages. What is the copyright status of this practice?

A: Prodigy and America Online "cache" popular Internet website pages on their own servers to provide better speed and reliability to its members. Some legal experts argue that making a digital copy of a document from the Internet, then providing it to hundreds of other users without notifying the originator violates copyright law. But this theory has not been tested in court yet.

Q: Will widespread "caching" of web pages interfer with the operation of the Clickshare service?

A: Yes and no. Absent secondary technology or service arrangements with the major services, it would make it impossible to track every click to copyrighted content. But the contract governing admission to the Clickshare service should take care of this problem administratively.

Here's how: For Prodigy or AOL to access a chargeable Clickshare-enabled page in the first place, they will have to be at minimum a technical member of Clickshare. We are in discussion on these subjects with the online services. And the contractual agreement we expect they will sign with Clickshare Corp. will be worded to make grabbing pages for caching a violation of the one-time, personal-use-only agreement -- unless the service also proxies the compensation structure as well.

The online service will employ a Clickshare-like structure to track access by its own users to pages cached from the Clickshare service and will provide to Clickshare individual records of each access for billing. In fact, the online services already have sophisticated systems for tracking the activities of individual users within their closed "universes."

Q: How many "clicks" equals one piece of content. Are all pieces of content valued equally for this purpose?

A: "Click" is shorthand for a Universal Resource Locator (URL) request in HTTP format. Most Clickshare users access information by the "click" of a mouse. One click of the mouse is one page of HTTP material. This turns out to be a highly flexible way of charging for information, both from the user and publisher perspective. Using Clickshare, the publisher can supply text, graphics, sound or software in response to a user's URL request. And the publisher can apply free-market principles in determining how much information to supply in response to a click and what it should cost.

The Clickshare user makes informed judgements about which information to "click" on based upon its value in terms of price, length or format. When the price is right, the user makes a purchase.

Early application of the Clickshare service will establish a "market" for the value of typical information sought. We expect that most publishers will offer to supply many resources for prices in the range of 10- to 25-cents and that users will "click" on such content without specific approval required for each purchase. On the otherhand, the Clickshare service will mandate user approval for purchases at higher rates. But the thresholds will be determined by the users and publishers when service is established and can be more or less infinitely customized.

Our expectation is that this will create a self-regulating mechanism for content providers to regulate pricing by the size of the page served; and for users to make content-purchase decisions on the same basis. If they find a content provider serves up minimal pages for 25 cents a pop, they won't click back again.

Q: What about charging different prices to different users and for different types of information?

A: No problem. Embedded in the Clickshare service is the ability to delineate "page classes" which have different retail values. This permits a Publishing Member, for example, to have "tiers" of service. One tier might be free content open to the public. The next "tier" might be content open at no charge solely to Clickshare enabled users. Another "tier" might be open to the Publisher Member's own local users for a monthly flat subscription fee -- and charged "by the click" to remote Clickshare users. And a final tier might be charged to all users, but at a different price depending whether the user is local or remote. Since the Clickshare server can identify the "class" of an incoming user, it can price-differentiate its service to that user.

Q: A number of companies are proposing to establish "e-cash" systems which charge Internet purchases to credit cards. What sets Clickshare apart -- and how can Clickshare be more economical than a credit-card transaction?

A: Clickshare is intended to work underneath and in collaboration with ecash and credit-card implementations. It is a compatible technology which is not hooked to any specific e-cash implementation; it can work with all of them.

As a consumer, you may not realize that each time you use your credit card, the business selling you a good or service is usually paying at least 25 cents plus 2% of your purchase for the privilege of getting paid by the credit-card issuer. While that is a trival piece of major transactions, it renders small exchanges prohibitively expensive. One reason for the 25-cent base fee is that credit-card authorizations must usually travel across conventional telephone circuits, resulting in unavoidably high cost.

Clickshare, on the other hand, operates across the Internet, where the cost of carriage of information is not presently charged "a la carte." as with the phone system. The Internet's TCP/IP protocol is very efficient at moving tiny parcels of digital information compared with traditional telephone lines. Taking advantage of this, Clickshare is designed to bundle dozens or even hundreds of individual information purchases during a monthly span and then obtain the oneline consumer's approval to charge them in bulk via a credit-card network once per month. Only then does the credit-card transaction have to go out on the traditional phone network. This results in a single credit-card transaction fee of 25 cents spread among many individual transactions and hence a highly efficient method of charging for information access.

Clickshare will charge a 20% transaction fee to the buyers of information. This fee will actually be charged to an intermediary -- the Clickshare user's home Publishing Member -- who will apply it to the user's account.

With credit-card processors typically charging 25 cents per transaction and 1.5- 2% of the total charge, you can see that Clickshare at the outset will always be cheaper than a direct credit-card charge for purchases of around $2.00 or less. We anticipate the Clickshare service will be able to aggregate and clear transactions to the credit-card networks efficiently enough to be able to lower the 20% charge for higher-amount transactions.

Q: You seem to be positioning Clickshare as the "pay per click" service. But don't consumers have an aversion to paying for things on a nickel-and-dime basis?

A: While Clickshare does enable payment "by the click," we anticipate that most publishers will still elect to provide their home-base users with a suite of information on a monthly subscription or "bulk" basis. However, any universal system of digital information exchange will have to value information "by the click" and provide for background settlement among publishers "by the click" if it is to function in a practical sense.

In most other media -- the telephone and cable networks come immediately to mind -- there are a variety of charging mechanisms and marketing strategies. But information is not like a sack of flour, a commodity where each grain is identical to the next. So it is not logical to think that it will be sold that way so long as there is another way to sell it.

In addition, whether consumers will resist paying for information when its value is measured in pennies rather than dimes or quarters is not yet documented, since prior to Clickshare and the Internet there was no economical way to sell information in that price range on a point-to-point, rather than broadcast, basis.

Finally, it is very well documented that specialized consumers will happily "pay per query" for some types of information. Examples include some types of business and professional information, exclusive and analytical reports and information in some way personalized to the consumer's interests.

Q: How would a publisher use Clickshare and not charge its subscribers "by the click"?

A: Clickshare works in background to "transport" information about the value of a page access between the publisher (who gets a royalty), the referring Home Publisher of the user (who gets a referral commission, sort of like being paid for creating a link). Whether the user's Home Publisher bills that user per-click is another story. What has to happen for the system to function is that the content-originator gets a royalty-by-the-click and the referring publisher gets a commission-by-the-click.

A newspaper Publisher might decide that its Clickshare-enabled users can get all-the-can-eat surfing of Clickshare resources costing less than 50 cents per click for a flat fee of $15 a month on top of their basic $4.95 charge. Then the publisher would do a calculus to make sure that on average the extra $15 would cover the typical surfing charges. Maybe they would figure they would be paying out royalties and our transaction fees adding up to an average of $13 a month, so they pocket $2 per user.

In this scenario, the user has purchased "bulk access" to Clickshare resources, so should be free of that sense of paying "by the click."

This is the way we use telephone service, in some respects. Some telcos offer "metered" local service, but give you a preset amount of "message units" per month which you "use or lose." Clickshare could operate the same way. Our point is that these are marketing considerations for a local- or topic-specific Publishing Member, not for Clickshare Corp. Our entire strategy is based upon empowering the publisher to control the user relationship.

Q: It is unclear to me after reading your web site's materials whether one must log in (enter password) for each web site visited.

A: No. And that is one of the key consumer-friendly features of Clickshare. The service allows you to maintain one registration that provides access to any publisher in the "Clickshare universe" of publishers. You log in once, at your Home Publisher (the place you choose to have your credit relationship), who authenticates you. This begins a "session". From that point, for some determined time, you can get information from any other Clickshare-enabled site (and you're never prevented from getting information from a non-enabled site) without having to re-authenticate at every "front door".

Q: When a publisher's own user requests a page of information from that Publishing Member's local Clickshare-enabled server, are either the user or the publisher charged by Clickshare?

A: This is not a quick answer.

First, there are three types of content available on a Clickshare-enabled server:

• Content not being tracked by the Clickshare service. We don't care how or if you are selling this.
• Content being tracked by the Clickshare service but for which no "per-query" amount is being charged. We call this Page Class Level 0 for no charge. If we are tracking it, we will charge 1 cent per access (Because we have to have funds to support and make money on our back end which is handling all the validation and clearance). It doesn't matter whether the Clickshare-enabled user is remote or local.
• Content being track by the Clickshare service for which a "per-query" amount IS being charged. We get 20%, period.

If you don't want to pay 20% to sell your own content to your own users, you can do one of two things:

• Sell it "all you can eat" (by subscription) so that all you are charged by us is one cent per access.
• Run it outside the Clickshare system for your local users and run it inside the Clickshare system for remote users. In this way, you will get no information (at least from Clickshare) about what your own users are looking at, and your own users will not be able to access content at other sites, potentially giving you a 35% referral commission each time they do.

Q: In a sense, isn't the Internet today like the U.S. telephone system just after the turn of the century?

A: Yes. Think of the Internet protocol -- the language computers speak across the Internet -- as a common transfer mechanism for data much as copper wires were a common transfer mechanism for voice in 1911. Everyone knew how to string to wires and make a phone connection after Alexander Graham Bell. But then how did you link together all those wires in a seamless grid such as we have today? And especially, how did you bill for all those calls that went from local telco to local telco to local "telco"?

In that era the answer was that the small companies first affiliated with the Bell System as franchisees and eventually were bought up and combined into AT&T. AT&T then developed a billing "standard" which by the 1960s made obsolete the need to have operators take billing information for a long-distance call. Ultimately AT&T was broken up, but the billing "standards" remain among AT&T, Sprint, MCI and the Baby Bells. Thus you can direct-dial a call across many networks and have the charges show up on one bill at the end of the month.

So Internet protocol for transferring information is like the copper wires. But like the early days of the phone system, no one has adopted, or even proposed prior to Clickshare, a billing standard for the transfer of information on the Internet measured other than by time or by bulk subscription. We believe Clickshare may emerge as such a standard.