Who Profits From Your Content When You're Dead?

Jules Kivell brings up a good point about digital legacies: what happens to your online persona when you die?

Digital Ghosts Remain When Folks Pass Away

Do *you* know all of your on-line accounts? Your Linked-In, Flickr, eBay, iTunes, online banking, PayPal and Facebook accounts can keep going for a *long* time. Would a loved one be able to housekeep for you? Do you have a file saved with all your on-line accounts and passwords?

One solution to this would be to maintain a password list in a safe deposit box so a family member could manage your online life once you pass.

This made me wonder what happens to the revenue you're generating from the grave. In a world where millions of bloggers have ads from AdSense or affiliate links on their site, it seems safe to assume that your content will continue to attract visitors and ad revenue after you've passed away.

Where does that revenue go? Are people passing along their AdSense and Amazon affiliate accounts in their wills? Will ad networks allow for the inheritance of publisher accounts?

I imagine, without proper planning, Google may find itself generating income from ads running on dormant sites with no one to share revenue with.

Does anyone have any experience dealing with this issue?

Good point. I guess someone better maintain your hosting and domain registrations. In the case of wordpress.com or blogger blogs, they could last a long long time pst one's death.

I was thinking recently about some sort of a post mortem service which would send an email to some people when you are dead. This service would assume you dead after a period of time set by yourself or after three reminders from this postmortem service asking you if you are alive on not.

Then this service would send a bunch of email to your lawyer, to your friends, to your ennemies, to your priest and to your relatives and there for you would send the password and the whole thing to some person you trust.

Thanks Ed!
I think it's still a struggle, tracking down access to everything that someone's set up digitally.
I've now got 2 friends who have passed away, and their Linked-In profiles are still active. One friend has still got an out of office message!
:-(
Part of me likes the fact that the internet doesn't know they've died.
But I would imagine that it can be a pretty painful reminder.

With the web growing as it is maybe we need some legislation on the bequeathes of web addresses.

However, I think that you only really need to hand over your email log-in details and your computer as, for example, 90% of the things I'm signed up for on the internet have one of two passwords:

Figuring out what things someone is signed up for is the really tricky part though. Using myself as an example again, I have absolutely no idea about all the things that I've signed up for. I found two old adsense accounts a while back and got a 100 dollar surprise (delivered to me in Euros here in Spain)!!!

Email addresses and social website accounts are not that important apart from informing net friends about a persons death. What strikes me as VERY important is things like paypal. There is a lot of money in some accounts that is if not claimed, will probably end up in paypals coffers. Can't imagine paypal going out of their way to help family, relatives etc etc

I would assume that the 'death' laws relating to ownership of the deceased assets would prevail in whatever country the deceased was domiciled. For example, if a man dies and he has no relatives other than his wife, then his wife should take over ownership.

However, I'm sure that no one has really considered ownership of internet sites, blogs etc. It is difficult to put a value on internet presence. For Adwords, they could place a value of, say, average revenue for 1 year, but this topic brings up all sorts of questions about inheritance tax, laws of ownership etc. GOOD TOPIC. It's got me thinking now...

Required fields marked with: *
Name*:

Email Address*:

URL:
Remember personal info?

Comments*:

HTML Tags you can use in your posts:
<b>Bold</b> = Bold
<i>Italicized</i> = Italicized
<a href="http://www.othersite.com">Link to Other Site</a> = Link to Other Site

Please keep comments on-topic. Contact authors or other commenters
directly for off-topic conversations.

Notify me of future comments via e-mail

Technology Evangelist Digest - Free Newsletter

Sign up for the free Technology Evangelist Digest to receive daily updates, editorials, and practical advice on emerging technology trends in hardware, software, webware, marketing and beyond.

Technology Evangelist Digest will keep you up to date on the technology trends that will help make you more productive and efficient both in business and your personal life.

Let's face it: If you made it to this line, you must have found something valuable on this page, right? Think about how cool it would be to have something free and interesting to read every day from Technology Evangelist by signing up today.

1. Fill in your email below,
2. Then click on the confirmation email you receive.
3. That's it. Your first Technology Evangelist Digest will arrive within 24 hours.