The CC BY-NC does not allow for commercial use of the publication. The term ‘commercial use’ refers to the fact that an organization intends to obtain a commercial advantage and possibly aims for financial remuneration. It is tempting to immediately think about large multinationals like Shell, Google, Amazon, but actually a non-commercial license (CC BY-NC) prevents all revenue-generating organizations from reusing your work.
This includes cultural or educational institutions like schools, museums or universities. Even those nowadays cannot rely exclusively on public funding and have to rely in part on their own revenues.
As such, the use of a NC license precludes a large pool of organizations and institutions from reusing your work, thus possibly reducing its impact and visibility. No matter what commercial party is reusing the material, the intended reuse may not necessarily be a bad thing.
