Billion Creative Commons Licensed Jobs

Millions of content creators around the world use Creative Commons licenses to share their creativity with others.

But counting the amount of this work is not an easy task. There is not a single form that you need to fill out to obtain a license, or a centralized repository, or at least a catalog. It is impossible to say exactly how many people use CC.

Therefore, the evaluation of the news site Opensource.com is only an approximation. According to their study , in 2015, the total number of works will exceed one billion. The report also contains the methods used.

Using the Google cache, websites were identified that contained a link to a description of the license on Creative Commons. These data were used to estimate the number of jobs. There are sites that link to CC documents for some other reason, but there are so few that they were not taken into account.

Some pages do not appear on Google for a variety of reasons. They were counted separately.

Most of the work under Creative Commons licenses is stored on the following sites: Flickr (307 million), Wikipedia (on all pages in all languages ​​111 million works), Scribd (50 million), MusicBrainz (39 million), Freebase (39 million) , deviantART (15 million), Geonames (10 million) and YouTube (10 million).

Tracked usage data for specific licenses. Every day, only from Creative Commons servers, logo images are given out 27 million times. This is only part: many sites do not directly point to pictures, but store them on their servers.

Even with access to wide information about how, by whom and where licenses are used, it would be too difficult to differentiate the concept of work. In many cases, it is not clear where each of the works begins and ends.

Therefore, the results obtained are accurate as far as possible within the framework of the study. All numbers received are the lower bound.

So, today there are 882 million works on the Internet distributed under a Creative Commons license. Of these, as many as 56% allow both processing and commercial use.

This is called a free culture license. In 2010, only 40% of the work was distributed under a free culture license. Probably, the increase in the share is due to the fact that users better understand how useful and important free works are.

In addition to numbers, the distribution by license is given:

• CC0 (Transmission to the public domain): 4%.
• CC BY (free use, distribution, modification and commercial use with attribution): 19%.
• CC BY-SA (same, but under the same distribution conditions): 33%.
• CC BY-ND (free use, distribution and commercial use unchanged): 2%.
• CC BY-NC (non-commercial use only, free distribution and change): 4%.
• CC BY-NC-SA (same, but derivative works must be licensed under the same conditions): 16%.
• CC BY-NC-ND (same, but without derivatives): 22%.

Authors of 76% of works allow change and adaptation, and 58% allow commercial use.

Creative Commons licenses are used worldwide. Country data was collected from the license type selection page . It is available in 34 languages, and the geography of its visitors is much more diverse than on other pages of the site, which are often available only in English.

Of course, the data are predominantly in the direction of English-speaking countries, since Creative Commons is more popular among the Anglophone. According to the results of geographical measurements, 2.03% falls on Russia and 0.6% on Ukraine.