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Quiet Lessons: How
Professional Content Services are Learning from Paid
Search |
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27 October
2003 |
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At the
SIIA Content Division's Brown Bag Lunch on "The Success
of Paid Search: How Does it Affect Content Companies?",
panelists from ad placement services and aggregators
wrestled with what's really working with contextual ad
services, but it was the quiet comments from Ovid that
deserve our closest attention. Players most familiar with
premium content used in major institutions are beginning to
look at ad placement services and are realizing that there
are key lessons for them to apply to their own operations.
Purchasing and using professional content may never be the
same. |
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The
SIIA Content Division's Brown Bag Lunches are proving to be
a very interesting, efficient and increasingly popular forum
for learning about some of the major trends that are impacting
the publishing industry. Last week's session was no exception,
focusing on "The Success of Paid Search: How Does it Affect
Content Companies?" Moderated by Paul Gerbino of the
Product
News Network and with senior representatives from
FindWhat.com,
Ovid
Technologies, Overture,
the Sprinks
division of Primedia and
Thomas Publishing Company, the panel had a great deal to
say about the state of the art in paid search capabilities, but
split in their perceptions when it came to pointing out its
impact on content companies, particularly for professionally
oriented content.
There was a great deal of talk about how
users are becoming more aware and adept search experts, with 20
percent of searching using three or more keyword terms and 15
percent using five or more, according to Patricia Neuray, Vice
President at Overture. People are using search to satisfy very
specific needs, to the point that contextual advertising is
becoming a highly powerful medium for promoting very specific
products and services that match user interests. From a
contextual ad service's perspective, though, there does not
seem to be much of a concern as to whether that product or
service is content or a washing machine. Professionals use
online search services to solve their business needs as much as
they do their personal needs, but the blurring of both the
content searched and the ads placed in those searches limits
the power of both the searches and the ads to provide maximum
value to people empowered with institutional budgets and
responsibilities.
Into this lively debate dropped the quiet
but powerful words of Bette Brunell,
Executive Vice President of Software
Products & Services at Ovid.
Professionally oriented aggregation and search services have
been watching the successes of contextual ad placement
services, it seems, and learning some very important lessons.
Based on her comments and the panel's reaction to her comments
- or lack thereof - we see a few things creeping in to the
behind-the-firewall world of content from the world of
contextual ads:
Lesson One: Professionals doing
searches find a lot of value in ads. Ads that are usually
stripped out of content when it is prepared for aggregators'
databases, presumably because they are annoyances that detract
from the professional nature of the content being presented.
The success of online contextual ad placement services, though,
is demonstrating that contextual ads create significant value
for many professionals trying to solve specific problems. If
online search services on the public Web are able to create
this value - and reap significant revenues - why not
professionally oriented search services as well? This is an
earthquake of sorts whose magnitude is difficult to gauge at
this point, but it could open up a new level of content
monetization opportunities for professional content aggregators
- and new payment models for institutions.
Lesson Two: Professionals using
consumer-oriented Web search services are looking for more
quality results. Why are users resorting to so many
keywords on their Web search services? To some degree because
they are getting more sophisticated about how to use search
features, and in part because they just aren't getting the
results that they're looking for from these services. The "dumbed
down" search interfaces and results polluted by inadequately
filtered sources are frustrating enough for consumers, but
downright inadequate for many firms trying to locate
business-level information relating to suppliers, markets and
clients. The potential for serving businesses and other
institutions with Web content that's more tuned to their
professional needs has been the goal of companies such as
Moreover for many years, but the world of B2B search on the
public Web is largely underserviced. It creates a great
opportunity for directory services such as Thomas, but probably
a greater opportunity for professionally oriented aggregators
and search engines such as Ovid to extend its technical and
editorial reach into the realm of publicly posted content that
services the needs of professionals far more effectively than
general-purpose search services.
Lesson Three: Contextual content
placement's value is more than for just pure advertising.
As noted in
Janice McCallum's soon-to-be released research on the value
of contextual ad placement techniques for premium content, the
line between advertising and content is becoming increasingly
blurred. Ad placement services have their ads clearly
distinguished from the main content displayed on a page, be
they in search results or editorially managed content, but in
the mind of the user it is part of the information experienced
in that content oftentimes at a par or better with the main
body of content. Are contextual ad placement services missing
out on the full value of that context? Are they in fact
interpreting those contexts with enough sophistication to allow
for the placement of not just ads, but, in the right economic
model, actual premium content? The ability of
professionally-oriented search engines to provide context for
both search results and other kinds of content that makes a
difference to institutions opens doors for a wide variety of
ways that those institutions can use that context to create
value for their operations. Can you imagine a Web-based search
engine with sophisticated parameters that finds not just
informative content but content that can lead directly to
institutional transactions? We can.
Contextual content placement via
search-based techniques is in its infancy, so it's not
surprising that some of the quieter but significant statements
on the Brown Bag panel may have been lost in some of the
prouder talk. Some panelists seemed to have missed the core
question of how paid search is affecting content companies.
While content companies can learn a lot by thinking about how
to increase the exposure of premium content to highly targeted
audiences through these techniques, it's also an opportunity
for them to think about how to use these techniques to change
their core business models, as well. That's a lesson that some
companies seem very ready to learn.
-
John Blossom
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