VG Wort and TYPO3: What You Need to Know as a Publisher

You build websites with TYPO3. You work with clients who publish content regularly: expert articles, guides, tutorials, and blog posts. Maybe you run a blog yourself. The writing is good, people read it, and it brings in traffic. And then? Then nothing happens with it, at least not financially.

What many people don’t realize is that Germany has a system that pays authors for exactly this kind of online writing. The money doesn’t come from Google or from ads. It comes from VG Wort. And no, this isn’t just for book authors or journalists at big publishing houses. It applies to anyone who publishes text online regularly, whether you’re a developer with a technical blog or an agency client publishing magazine articles, blog posts, and expert content.

At b13, we see it all the time: companies and agencies invest heavily in content, but they’ve either never heard of VG Wort or assume it’s too much hassle. It doesn’t have to be, especially when your CMS does the work for you.

This post kicks off a three-part series where I explain how VG Wort works and how we built the integration into TYPO3.

VG Wort (short for Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort) is a German collecting society, similar to what GEMA does for music. It represents the copyrights of authors and publishers and pays out royalties for the secondary use of written works.

The idea is that whenever a text is read, copied, or used in some other way, its author is owed compensation. The money comes from levies on devices like printers, computers, and copiers, plus library royalties and similar sources. VG Wort collects these funds and distributes them to registered authors and publishers.

Here’s where it gets interesting for online publishers: online texts have been part of this system for years. If you publish an expert article on your website that’s long enough and gets enough readers, you’re entitled to an annual payout.

The amount varies, and lately it has been going down. For the 2025 reporting year, the payout was around €20 per eligible text. Earlier years paid more:

The amount depends on how much money is in the pot and how many texts are reported, and both change every year. So don’t count on a fixed figure. But even at €20 per text, a magazine publishing 50 or 100 expert articles a year adds up to an amount that’s worth the effort, as long as the effort stays small. That’s what this series is all about.

METIS is VG Wort’s reporting system for online texts. The name is a German acronym for “reporting system for texts on websites.” Its web portal is called T.O.M. (Texte Online Melden, or “report texts online”). That’s where you order tracking pixels, report texts, and keep an eye on your reporting status. Whenever you see T.O.M. in this series or in VG Wort documentation, it refers to this portal.

First, you register with VG Wort and sign a rights administration agreement (Wahrnehmungsvertrag). This gives VG Wort the right to manage your royalty claims, meaning it collects money on your behalf and pays it out to you. It’s free and doesn’t commit you to anything else.

Once you’re registered, you can order tracking pixels (Zählmarken) in T.O.M. A tracking pixel is an invisible 1×1 image with a unique URL that you embed in your web page. Every time someone loads the page, VG Wort counts the visit.

Each text gets its own tracking pixel with a unique ID. In HTML, it looks just like a regular tracking pixel:

Not every text qualifies. VG Wort has clear criteria:

• Text length: at least 1,800 characters, including spaces. That’s about three-quarters of a letter-size page, which is no problem for an expert article.
• Minimum views: VG Wort’s committees set the threshold each year. For about ten years, it has held steady at 1,500 views per reporting period. The catch is that only views from Germany count. International traffic doesn’t factor in, so a website with solid overall numbers can still fall well short of the threshold.

If you publish long-form content, two rules make all the difference.

Past 10,000 characters, a quarter is enough. Texts of this length only need to reach 25% of the minimum views. The condition is that an eISSN for the domain is registered in your account. For a trade magazine, this is the single most important rule. It’s what turns a text that just missed the mark into one you can report.

There are bonuses at the top end. Texts that exceed the minimum views 15 times over get 20% more, and texts that exceed it 150 times over get 40% more.

The takeaway: a few long, widely read texts often earn more than many short ones.

METIS has a fixed reporting deadline, and the reform changed it. The deadline is now 31 March, starting on 31 March 2027, and it applies to both the access-based distribution and the circulation-based distribution. If you miss it, you lose your claim for that period. Put it in your calendar. In this whole system, it’s the one date that won’t budge.

VG Wort has reformed its payout model, and that’s good news for anyone who tracks their texts properly with tracking pixels.

The former special distribution (Sonderausschüttung) is now the circulation-based distribution (Verbreitungsausschüttung), and this is more than a new name. It now applies only to works published in 2026 or later, it covers e-books, journal articles, and broadcaster content, and it pays out once per work rather than every year.

Most importantly, the reform shifts where the money goes:

• Access-based distribution (with tracking pixels): receives at least 80% of the METIS budget. Payouts are based on actual views of your texts.
• Circulation-based distribution: receives no more than 20%.

The message is clear: if you embed tracking pixels properly, you get the bigger share. If you don’t, you’re competing for a fifth of the pot. For publishers with a lot of content, a clean integration is worth more than ever.

Now for the practical part. Imagine you manage a website with 200, 500, or 1,000 editorial pages. For each page, you need to:

1. Order a tracking pixel in T.O.M.
2. Assign the code to the right page.
3. Add the pixel to the page’s HTML.
4. Check at the end of the year which texts meet the minimum requirements.
5. Report those texts before the deadline.

Doing this by hand might work for five blog posts. With 50, it gets tedious. With 500, it’s not realistic, at least not without mistakes and forgotten texts.

This is where the CMS comes in. When TYPO3 manages the tracking pixels, the assignments happen automatically. Editors don’t need to know what a tracking pixel is. Developers don’t have to touch every page by hand. And at the end of the year, you know exactly which texts you can report.

In our experience, this is where most publishers fall short. Registering with VG Wort and signing the agreement are the easy parts. Keeping it running day to day is where it breaks down. Maintain pixels by hand across 300 pages and you’re bound to lose track, or give up after the first year.

At b13, we built two TYPO3 extensions to solve exactly this problem.

The VG Wort extension (vgwort) is our free extension and covers the basics of integrating tracking pixels into TYPO3. It assigns pixels to pages and renders them automatically in the frontend. For many use cases, that’s all you need.

The VG Wort Pro package goes a step further. It adds automatic character counting, reporting status, an API connection to METIS, and automated reporting. It’s built for agencies and publishers with larger content libraries who want to handle the whole process in TYPO3, from assigning pixels to submitting reports.

In the next two parts of this series, I’ll walk you through both extensions in detail, with configuration, real-world examples, and concrete workflows.

If you haven’t signed a rights administration agreement with VG Wort yet, now is a good time. Registration is free and simple, and the sooner you add tracking pixels, the sooner your texts start collecting the views they need.

In the next post, I’ll show you how to set up the integration in TYPO3 in just a few minutes with EXT:vgwort.