The five million dollar logo

Shortly after issuing our press release for the Inc. 5,000, I received a call from Reprint Management Services, a company engaged by Inc. to license stuff relating to the Inc. 5,000 award. Why? We had pasted the Inc. 5,000 logo on our BZ Media home page, and on our press release page. We were politely instructed to either take the logo down or license it.

License? That’s right: Inc. charges $990 per company to license one version of the logo for one year, or $1,450 to license a whole package of logo versions. If every Inc. 5,000 winner chose to license just one logo version, that’s worth $4,950,000 — which is pure profit for Inc., less a sales commission due to RMS. Not bad work if you can get it.

That prompted me to look at all the cool stuff we could license. We could get a Platinum Package with lots of reprints, logo usage for a year, promotional postcards, 500 commemorative issues and a bunch of little statuettes, all for only $8,500. There are posters, suitable for framing, for $590 each. Lots of things.

We took down the logo from BZMedia.com.

By the way, BZ Media produces two awards which have logos: the SD Times 100 and the Testers Choice (from Software Test & Performance Magazine). We don’t charge any fee whatsoever for winners to use our award logos.