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Getting It 2.0: The Content Industry
Adapts to Users as Today's Leading Publishers |
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13 April 2006 |
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This year's Buying and Selling eContent conference brought
on a much-improved range of topics and participants who
delved deep into many of the toughest issues faced in
today's content industry. Yet in spite of the improved
representation from enterprise content buyers and online
media giants some of the most important publishers and
buyers were nowhere near the Camelback resort this week.
When everyone within reach of the Web can create,
aggregate, enhance and distribute content themselves with
amazing ease the dialog required to "get it" in today's
content marketplace requires including the users who do far
more publishing and aggregating than any one else today. |
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The seventh annual
Buying and Selling eContent conference in Scottsdale,
Arizona was a revitalized gathering of publishers, aggregators
and content buyers from enterprise and media markets, flush
with key figures with lots to share and very active
conversations and deal-making. Unlike earlier gatherings at
this conference, there seemed to be precious little preaching
from online leaders telling publishers and aggregators how they
were not "getting it." Instead, the phenomenon that is the Web
was unquestionably and firmly in control as the prime driver of
strategies for all involved in the conference - with users
trained by its omnipresent influence at the center of it all.
The message seems to be from these participants, "Yes, we get
it and we're trying to do it. Now how far do we need to go from here?" The answer seems to be: as far as it takes to serve your
users.
In response to the pressures of a Web growing out of its
adolescence rapidly Y.S. Chi, Vice Chairman of Elsevier, saw
publishers and aggregators having to supply the "great
stuff, right away, gotta go" combination with the strong
quality, productivity and community elements that today's
successful online content products provide their users.
Yet as Y.S. noted most major publisher sales forces are not at
all well aligned to listen to their clients and become the
sophisticated "uber-publishers" required to support today's
content users and buyers. Even when key leaders in publishing
companies "get it," the organizational transformations required
to do something with what you get are still only beginning in
the content industry.
Content buyers themselves are facing their own adjustment to
a maturing Web, making many familiar pleas at the conference for better licensing terms from
aggregators and publishers, but also trying to carve out their
own "uber-publisher" identities for themselves in their
organizations. Suppliers are beginning to reach out and try new ways to
experiment with more open licensing schemes that could support
their demands for more flexible deployment and user management requirements,
but that's only part of the solution. With more publishers
selling direct to institutions at the division, department and
workgroup level, as well as to individual content consumers,
content buyers are more than ever the people who are solving
business problems in business units rather than central buyers.
As noted by keynoter Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO of
O'Reilly Media, today's content users and buyers are oftentimes
active participants in creating value in the publishing
process, becoming used to being participants in the digital
drama and collaborating with others to create the content that
they value most. Helping these involved users requires not just
delivering popular content but as well empowering them to find
value through the "long
tail" of obscure content largely ignored by many publishers
until search engines made it possible for it to be placed in
valuable contexts. However it is accomplished, empowering users
to define the value of content is increasingly in their own
hands, with help from publishers who know how to empower them.
My detailed conference notes are posted on our
Industry Events weblog if you'd like to catch up in detail.
In summary the key factor emerging from the conference is that
the pace of change required to respond to today's challenges in
publishing is both relentless and still escaping even the most
well-endowed players in both enterprise and media content
markets. Here are a few of the points NOT addressed effectively
at the conference which point to the trouble spots in this
accelerating market that are likely to be the focus of next
year's conference:
- Licensing. While there were some noises about
flexible pricing schemes at the conference, the huge gap that
remains largely unaddressed by the publishing industry is how
to develop licensing schemes that can be adapted to "on the
fly" usage requirements and multiple user relationships to
content based on their own purchases and their affiliations
with various organizations and communities. Today's content
marketplace has grown far past the craft of most licensing
experts used to drawn-out negotiations and complex agreements
largely obscure to the users who need to understand their
rights clearly and immediately on a multitude of platforms.
- Multimedia. One of the big surprises at the
conference was how little representation there was from
producers of video, audio and other multimedia content. The
rapid surge in demand for Web-based multimedia in both
consumer and enterprise markets has begun to create an
altogether new chapter in electronic content. Like its
predecessors in text multimedia is also part of the
user-generated media phenomenon that sees both individuals
and institutions becoming far more expert at producing and
integrating audio, video and animated content - and
transforming the devices that are used to produce and store
this content. It doesn't mean that business content producers
need to "go Hollywood," but they do need how to learn from
the lessons of consumer media companies who have struggles to
adapt to the Web environment.
- Users as aggregators. Unfortunately a lot of the
business-oriented publishers at the conference were not very
tuned in to the growth of tools in users' hands to aggregate,
publish and republish content created by themselves, their
colleagues and professional publishers. With the PC becoming
just one of many platforms that users need on a daily basis,
user-defined aggregation and search tools are not only
growing but growing rapidly beyond publishers' ability to
track usage and relationships. While it's certainly important
for publishers to master the art of Web search engine
placement and marketing they are mostly just at the very
beginning of recognizing that the Web is only where content
aggregation begins these days.
With users firmly in control of the future of publishing,
one hopes that we'll see a wider range of roles represented at
next year's conference. Publishers are "getting it" more than
ever, but the "it" is a moving target that includes more
producers, buyers and users of content than ever before. Let's
invite them all down to Camelback next year to soak up the sun
and the content, shall we?
-
John Blossom
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