November 2021 was marked by an unusual event: the venture firm Slow Ventures and private investors, the Lieberman brothers and Mr. Krishnan, invested in a person – Marina Mohylko, a YouTube blogger from Russia .
Marina is an example of a successful blogger, she has three channels: the lifestyle project “Girl from Silicon Valley” with 505 thousand subscribers, the video blog Marina Mogilko with 1.3 million subscribers and the language channel linguamarina with 4.5 million subscribers, in total her channels are subscribed 6.3 million users. Mohylko also launched a training course “How to create and promote your channel on YouTube” worth $475 (according to the blogger, more than 5,000 people bought the course).
As Business Insider noted, the Slow Ventures fund has allocated $20 million to support bloggers since the beginning of 2021, so the investment in Mogilko is not the company’s last investment in digital content producers. The fund also invests in IT projects and the crypto industry.
Under the terms of the agreement, Marina will pay investors 5% of all her profits for 30 years. However, it seems that the blogger is satisfied with such conditions, since she will be able to reduce the number of advertising partners and focus on the things that she really likes to do. “Google AdSense is a good source of income, but I also have to do a lot of affiliate deals to maintain a stable income. It distracts a lot from creativity,” Mohylko explained.
This event means two important things:
1) Venture business considers not only companies but also individuals to be potentially profitable and scalable, which means that talented Internet authors have an opportunity for financing;
2) The content generated by bloggers is not inferior in its investment attractiveness to IT startups and innovative projects. And here the proper protection of the intellectual property of the author comes to the fore.
Bloggers generate a huge amount of content every day, but are often unaware that the fruits of their creativity create legal relationships. The content created by the blogger is protected by copyright. Texts are like literary works; videos are like audiovisual works. If the blog includes mixed content, then in fact there is a collection of different works, the protection of which is granted depending on their type. Legal protection is also provided to the manner of the blogger’s speech – facial expressions, gestures, recitation – within the framework of the protection of related rights of performers.
The name of the channel/blog can be registered as a trademark, which will facilitate the commercialization of the project. Given the peculiarities of blogging, we recommend registering a trademark in cases where the commercialization of the blog is carried out through the sale of author’s products (for example, author’s courses) or the provision of any services. Individualization of author’s content on the digital market by registering a trademark will reliably ensure its legal protection, as well as promote the blogger.
We also recommend putting the sign ©, year, blog name or surname (pseudonym) under the published texts to inform about your exclusive rights and content. The presence of such a copyright sign will inform a potential infringer that the content on the channel/blog is an object of intellectual property and its owner is interested in protecting his copyright.
Sources:
https://vc.ru/media/315222-venchurnye-investory-vlozhili-1-7-mln-v-youtube-blogera-iz-rossii-marinu-mogilko-v-obmen-na-dolyu-ot-ee- dohodov
https://platforma-online.ru/media/detail/venchurnye-investory-vlozhili-1-7-mln-v-blogera-iz-rossii-v-obmen-na-dolyu-ot-ego-dokhodov-/
https://secretmag.ru/news/investory-vlozhili-120-mln-rublei-v-blogershu-iz-rossii-06-11-2021.htm
https://vc.ru/finance/105945-venchurnye-investicii-chto-eto-takoe-kak-oni-rabotayut-i-kakie-est-plyusy-i-minusy
https://legalacademy.ru/sphere/post/zakony-blogosfery-kak-i-kem-reguliruyutsya-avtorskie-prava-v-seti
https://thebell.io/strategii-venchura-pochemu-bolshie-fondy-ne-gonyatsya-za-pribylyu-v-kazhdoj-sdelke