 |
|
|
Street Level: How Factiva Fashions
Itself for an Era of Rowdy and Robust vContent |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
24 May 2004 |
|
|
|
|
A recent conversation with
Factiva
CEO Clare Hart demonstrated the strength of her
efforts to bring this child of Dow Jones
and Reuters from its birth five years ago towards a
promising adolescence. From single-line queries tuned to
user profiles to portal integration and to its ingenious
Insight Reputation Management system that gleans powerful
intelligence from scraps of "street" content such as
weblogs and user groups, Factiva is pushing hard on many
fronts to create highly effective
vContent solutions. But with open Web search engines
and other venues helping publishers to prove their value
head-to-head against "street" content, how much time
do aggregators like Factiva have to leverage their vContent
skills? |
|
Clare Hart
fashions herself as the very model of a modern major
vContent company CEO. As
Factiva
celebrates its fifth anniversary, under her tutelage the gleam
in Gordon Crovitz' eye has turned itself from an awkward
amalgamation of aging subscription database products from
Dow Jones and Reuters into a leading-edge content service aimed
at the institutional marketplace. These transatlantic parents
have left Hart on her own for the most part, checking in with
her quarterly or so to see what's happening in her sandbox. As
they check in this time around, they should be pretty pleased
with how her castle is taking shape. Gone is the dowdy
publishing feed management of old, replaced by modern
XML-driven infrastructure that can drive content acquisition
from all quadrants and package it via Web services and other
portal-driven interfaces into any number of highly contextual
client environments - including Microsoft's Office software.
A new simplified search interface emulates Google-like
simplicity for initiating searches with intelligent profiling
features that maximize the likelihood of finding contextual
answers. Their reputation management software that churns
through content from both premium and less formally marketed
"street" content
turns up answers to what people are really thinking months
before mainstream publishers begin to get an inkling of what's
happening in the real world. Improved business information
capabilities await in the wings. All and all, it's the right
portfolio of capabilities at the right time with the right crew
in charge of execution.
Now comes the hard part: making real
money at it. Factiva has eked out a nominal profit built mostly
from existing revenue streams almost from its inception. Now,
after two years of migrating legacy clients from Dow Jones and
Reuters onto the Factiva platform Clare Hart is turning the Factiva
sales force loose on integrating and fashioning a more
diversified approach to revenue generation that focuses heavily
on meeting contextual client requirements. One of the keys to this effort
is driving the "street" content from countless weblogs,
discussion groups and other Web watering holes into Factiva's
premium Insight Reputation Management platform that allows
institutions to glean important trends in how their markets
perceive their products and services rapidly - oftentimes
months before the mainstream press has come close to
identifying a trend. "Consumers usually don't lie," noted Clare
Hart in a recent discussion, underscoring the power of
individual publishing to transform our perception of the truth
- an automated "Fourth
Estate" bypassing corporate and editorial filters.
Factiva Insight Reputation Management is
an ingenious piece of vContent work, creating cutting-edge
premium value out of "worthless" content sources. But there is
some irony in recognizing the value of unvarnished truth and
opinion in a highly processed environment and being unable to
recognize it as mainstream content that people take seriously
in and of itself. Here are a few observations as to what the
strength of "street" content means to aggregators such as
Factiva - and their premium sources:
- Source-agnostic aggregators rule
vContent. Both behind firewalls and on the open Web the
solutions that seem to provide users with the most
satisfaction are those that do not presume too much where
authoritative facts and opinions may exist. Although
aggregators such as Factiva may extend their taxonomies to
this environment, in general their premise is to add value to
a database of structured premium content to which users may
subscribe. If it isn't in that database - or at the Web site
of an affiliated publisher - it isn't "real" content. The
presumption that premium, print-oriented publications are the
center of the content universe just doesn't wash in an era
when millions of pages of new content are added online and in
institutions every day. Unfortunately most aggregators'
infrastructure still centers on that core premise, for if
non-subscription content turns out to be more "real" than
subscription content, underlying revenues are threatened.
- Traditional aggregation works less
and less well for text-oriented publishers. Like other
aggregators Factiva focuses a great deal of its efforts on
providing value-add services on top of its premium content
database, leveraging its content contextually into enterprise
portals and workflows via a wide range ot technology
solutions. Great stuff for Factiva - but oftentimes not great
for text-oriented publishers trying to maintain relationships
with their subscriber base. With print subscriptions being
slashed in both private and public institutions, the tepid
revenues of Factiva and other major aggregators reflect the
inability of publishers to create new value to their
subscriber bases through third parties that strip out much of
the contextual and communal value of their content. Search
engines that do not presume databasing of sanitized content
as a core premise allow publishers of all stripes to present
content in its native context. This is increasing the
attractiveness of both open Web search engines as a delivery
mechanism for premium publishers and of less database-centric
approaches to delivering content to institutions. In effect,
more publishers are "going street" to try to find their
audiences where they like to be found.
- Many text-oriented publishers
still don't know how to "go street." Having Web-savvy
content is still a mystery to a significant portion of
publishers, whose operations are at risk in an era that
demands it. Without helping these publishers to adapt, there
is the risk that a significant portion of premium
publications known today will simply disappear - and along
with them the content base on which aggregators rely for
their revenues. In the meantime a generation of publishers
has grown up that does not rely on databased content for
successful electronic operations. The fabric of "real"
content is shrinking, and getting thinner.
Factiva is poised to push its
capabilities into many interesting market niches and stands to
have a strong sixth year of operations. But as the realities of
publishers catch up with Factiva and other traditional
aggregators, expect them to have to make some increasingly
difficult choices as to what it means to be an aggregator
today. "Street" content is strong, and only getting stronger.
Those who can take the battle to the street level will have
some nice celebrations of their own this time next year.
-
John Blossom
To top of page
 |
