 |
|
|
Playing for Keeps: How KeepMedia Keeps
Tuning a Plan for Personalized Content |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
16 February 2004 |
|
|
|
|
After a very low-key debut last fall
KeepMedia,
the brainchild of Louis Borders, continues to see
improvements in its content serving capabilities
and a broadening of its off-newsstands magazine and journal
sources and news wire content. A recent conversation with KeepMedia CEO Doug Herrington revealed that by
concentrating on researcher-friendly features at very
accessible consumer prices, KeepMedia is building a way of
doing business with premium content that could become very
compelling over time. But in the race to create a
user-friendly environment for premium content that can
compete with open Web sources, KeepMedia's worst enemy may
be the pace at which its publishing partners are willing to
move towards the economic realities of online content. |
|
Last fall saw the debut of
KeepMedia,
a premium content service spearheaded by Louis Borders, dot-com
survivor and founder
of the eponymous bookstore chain. For a
major media announcement, it was a modest start at best: search
and buy back issues of a relative handful of off-the-newsstands magazines.
At the time KeepMedia seemed to play
to the interests of highly Web-averse magazine publishers well
enough, but not much else. With open search engines like Google
beginning to target premium online content and services such as
Moreover learning how to combine subscription-based content
access with Web content, what possible value would a portal
with dated magazine content have to most content consumers?
After several months KeepMedia seems to
be well on the way to starting to answer some of these
questions. In a recent discussion with KeepMedia CEO Doug
Herrington it became clear that KeepMedia's low profile to date
is as much about gradually tuning a business model and its way
of serving specific clients and client bases as it is about
working with an expanding base of quality publications. Perhaps
having lived through the dot-com boom and bust cycle the
KeepMedia management is more interested in gradually building
up the right way of doing business rather than trying to soar
on the wings of a strategy that's too lofty for its own good.
What you have today at KeepMedia is a cross-publication portal
that blends a growing list of more than 150 consumer, business
and professional magazines and journals as well as news wire
content into an online environment that is editorially managed
in some sections but that also includes some very nifty
automated content tracking tools. The more that one uses
KeepMedia to search for content the more that it learns about
your needs and interests - information that it uses to alert
you to newly available content in an Amazon-style fashion,
either via the portal or via email updates. The portal
maintains a topic listing not unlike the section headings of
most major magazines and papers, handy for someone wanting to
do a "super-browse" of major publications. And unlike an
automated Web-wide tool such as Google News, navigation
elements remain consistent when one moves from one content
source to another. All this for $4.95 a month or $49.95 a
year - about half the price of an individual subscription to
other premium content research tools aimed at individuals.
Doug Herrington refers to this as a
"content retailing environment", picking up on the Web where
"big box" stores such as Borders left off in the "bricks"
retailing world. The intent is to create a "walled garden"
effect, a pleasant, consumer-oriented environment in
which publishers can monetize content in a way that works with
their current models and allows them to feel somewhat protected
from the vicissitudes of services such as Google News picking
up their ad-supported portal content as it's posted. Expanded
with more content sources and more up-to-date access it's not
inconceivable that a service like this could make its way into
a major portal's offerings, a content super newsstand where one
can have their interests catered to by the automated and human
KeepMedia content concierges.
But will KeepMedia break out from its
current modest vision to a more compelling and encompassing
presence? The feature set and editorial components of KeepMedia
are slick, useful and compelling, well designed in most all
aspects, very comfortable to use and growing by the day in
their capabilities. Think of it as a Google-like "beta" that's
paying for much of its own product development via subscription
fees. There's a lot going on here, but as of yet a limited
range of content on which to apply its talents. Unlike services
such as HighBeam (formerly Alacritude), Doug Herrington makes
it clear that KeepMedia is not interested in integrating
general Web content into its research fold - untamed content
that might interfere with the perceived value of premium
content and limit content "finding" features to more of a
typical one-line search interface. Alas, there's the rub for
both KeepMedia and many other services trying to figure out a
way to aggregate premium content effectively for individuals in
a Web environment. It's nearly impossible to provide true
concierge content services for individuals that encompass both
structured content from across the entire Web as well as
professional sources using today's technology. But in the
meantime there's a widening range of technology capabilities
that come pretty close - and they don't dicker with who's
trying to sell content and who's not.
Knowingly or not KeepMedia and its
cohorts are in a race to define a compelling retailing
environment for premium content that satisfies the revenue
needs of their supplying publishers while trying to keep up
with a Web environment that produces more and more very
high-quality content and that does not rely on those older
models for their ongoing success. Like the 99-cent
rights-protected song downloads of today, low-cost premium
content portals such as KeepMedia are pushing a lot of the
right buttons in terms of user-friendly methods but will find
themselves struggling over time with price points that are
difficult to justify in the overall landscape of today's
content usage. In the instance of KeepMedia this problem may
correct itself over time: having a content concierge service
that covers all but the most esoteric premium non-multimedia
content for $5-10, including all up-to-the-minute postings, is
probably the range that most online content consumers will feel
comfortable paying anyway. It's more a matter at this point of
how quickly that bucket can be filled with interesting things -
be they from traditional or non-traditional sources.
For now KeepMedia continues to refine its
content serving capabilities for its consumer, academic and
professional users and to expand its available sources. At some
point, though, it must start playing for keeps in the
accelerating battle for premium content dominance. With their
content suppliers so wary of moving beyond their traditional
venues, it's hard to see how that will happen. But when you're
playing for keeps, things tend to fall into place more quickly
than you may think...
-
John Blossom
To top of page
 |
