Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2011. The claim that no company in Spain handled the management and transfer of digital assets reflects 2011; digital legacy services now exist, and Spain’s 2018 data protection law (Organic Law 3/2018) recognises a right to a ‘digital will’.
What we call an asset (income that keeps coming in without needing labour) includes digital assets, which can be as varied as an online store, a website or a blog. There are business opportunities around all of this, because few people realise how important it is to list your domain name among your company’s assets (although traditional gestorías, the Spanish agencies that handle business paperwork, already point this out).
The business idea we’re proposing is based on other facts. It’s estimated that there are currently more than 2 million bloggers earning over €300 a month, not to mention some who make more than €15,000 a month from advertising. Then there are entrepreneurs who opened an online store with a range of products at the time; they’re no competition for eBay, but they can easily bring in €1,000–2,000 a month.
Imagine for a moment that these people have an accident or die. In many cases their own family wouldn’t be able to keep receiving the income the deceased used to earn, because he or she left no passwords to access the accounts. And in many other cases, even with access, the relatives wouldn’t understand how to carry on the business or how to transfer a domain into their own name. They would need some kind of will signed by the blogger.
Put simply, in most cases, once the blogger is gone, the income is lost, not least because the bank closes the accounts of people who have died.
In Spain at least, there is still no company dedicated to managing and transferring digital assets, even though the number of new bloggers and online entrepreneurs is growing considerably. A company did appear, however, which we covered in a previous article: for a small yearly fee, it says goodbye to your social media contacts for you if you leave this world. We called it “The last goodbye on the internet”.
It’s strange that, with all the money that moves through the internet, no agency offers this service of managing online wealth or digital assets. So, for any daring entrepreneurs out there, here is a business idea that could be quite interesting. I’d be the first to want the income I earn online to pass to my family if anything happened to me, so they had the chance to carry on with something I created myself.
Featured image: Cathrine Sæther, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
