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Younger Days: Buyers and Sellers of
Content Adapt to New Content Value Propositions |
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18 April 2005 |
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This year's Buying and Selling eContent conference in
Scottsdale, Arizona featured many established stars of the
content industry along with successful mavericks touting
community-driven content solutions. In the midst of this
equation were the institutional content buyers, equipped
with increasingly virtual library collections but many of
the all-too-real issues of content licensing that have been
their lament for years. Somewhere between the mavericks and
the established players is a powerful value proposition
taking form for premium content aimed at professionals that
emphasizes maximizing basic distribution to engage content
where its premium forms will take root. Content licensing
models based on obsolete distribution patterns may be
slowing down the growth of high-margin services that are
really valued by clients. Time to get the real content
buyers engaged in the conversation? |
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Our team of
analysts in attendance at this year's Buying and Selling
eContent conference in Scottsdale got a lot out of the
presentations and discussions with major content company and
executives and major institutional content purchasers. As
highlighted in our weblogs the "barbarians" of new content
sources are already well within the gates of established
streams, with community-edited sources such as
Wikipedia
and del.icio.us
challenging long-held assumptions about what it takes to create
and organize authoritative and respected content sources.
Online content is now a given for most in attendance and well
under the wing of many major publishers and aggregators, even
as virtual libraries now dominate institutional content
collections. When Information Today, Inc. President Tom Hogan,
Sr. defined the unofficial theme for this year's conference
"We'll be younger next year" it was a nod towards traditional
content businesses that are looking beyond old models to
becoming experts in new channels for content marketing, even as
new players chime in with highly effective alternatives forcing
change in the marketplace.
But in the midst of all of this change one aspect of the
content industry seems to change at a Guttenberg-like pace:
content licensing. Buying and selling electronic content for
most major institutions is still about controlling the costs of
bulk licensing agreements with major publishers and
distributors. Changes to this basic dance appear to be
slow at best sometimes as both parties have a fairly heavy
investment in existing models and procedures. As one
information professional put it in some offline comments at the
conference, "Our customers have the same complaints about us:
they want more flexible terms, more cost-effective purchasing.
We recognize that the publishers are in the same bind as us."
In a discussion of distributing content via mobile phone
carriers major content distributors were wrestling with these
new channels in much the same manner as they have via other
media outlets, recognizing the need to define profitable
services but revolving around familiar terms and conditions..
Yet these traditional negotiation patterns are a little like
the fellow in
Raiders of the Lost Ark who relishes the idea of tearing
apart Indiana Jones with his flashing sword - only to be
plugged by Jones with a casual shot from a revolver. While
information professionals and their content suppliers duke it
out year after year over the same litany of licensing issues
the users in both institutional and public content venues are
moving on to more valuable content propositions. Here are
a few key factors on emerging trends in content licensing
emerging from this conference that need to be considered by
content vendors and purchasers alike:
- Distribution's the point only when you make it the
point. As is becoming standard at publishers' conferences
the spectre of Google and other search engines was lurking in
many discussions in Scottsdale about managing content
distribution. Yet for the most part search engines play a
vital role in getting a publisher's content into the context
in which its users will find it to be valuable. The
"distribution" via search engines is relatively moot: the
content comes from the publisher's site in most instances
anyway. Basing licensing on distribution rights still makes
sense in venues such as mobile and satellite where networks
have created new "choke points" to control who sees what, but
in any environment which has access to the public Web
licensing based on distribution controls such as database IDs
and passwords is artificial at best. Most enterprise
licensing schemes have danced around this point for years,
but the Web's openness and the rise of enterprise search
engines that make cross-source access increasingly easy and
transparent are pressing in on licensing based on obsolete
distribution models.
- Encouraging use, interaction and redistribution is the
key. While enterprise licensing is hardly a cure-all for
publishers' woes, the trend towards flat-fee enterprise
content licensing helps content distributors to focus on the
value obtained from a content product once it arrives, not on
the delivery process. In open network environments the key is
to get basic content into the right context as quickly and
effectively as possible where its utility can be monetized
via contextual content delivered with the core content (ads
and transaction opportunities) and/or premium content,
packaging and services. This may seem counterintuitive to
people who have wrestled with "seat" oriented licensing
agreements for generations of database products - and indeed
there are plenty of highly specialized databases that will
still survive and thrive with traditional licensing schemes.
But for many content providers over-restrictive licensing
schemes for basic access will keep the clients' focus away
from making your content as useful as possible for as many
users as possible while substitutes from other sources gain
focus.
- Learn how to add value where it's needed most.
The question of access to premium content tends to cloud the
more important question of how useful people find the content
once it's available and how well a content company is able to
respond to the immediate needs of its clients with
"just-in-time" content solutions. For a vendor such as
TechTarget, adding value has been a matter of shifting from
the mentality of advertising to the mindset of facilitating
sales opportunities for vendors who match highly specific
user needs. For LexisNexis and Alacra, it's honing in on very
powerful user applications that solve tough business
problems. For Global Insight, it's positioning advisory
services on financial and economic recommendations as a
premium service. No matter what the execution may be,
understanding the context and moment of highest value is the
key to premium content profits.
The trend in publishing towards value-add services that meet
the needs of specific audiences underscores the importance of
developing a relationship with the people who need content in
more usable forms as quickly and effectively as possible.
Regardless of whether they sign agreements directly, these are
the real "buyers" that need to be a part of the market
conversation. Here's to the next Buying and Selling eContent
conference including more of these people who look beyond
traditional licensing schemes to new content value
propositions. I'm told that we'll be younger then: hope so.
-
John Blossom
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