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The New Old Guard: Battling for the
Future of Business Information |
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3 April 2007 |
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Two major conferences focusing on business information
services point towards two very different approaches to
creating revenues and profits from today's enterprise and
media markets. Yet both database publishers and media
companies are circling around many of the same
opportunities to develop value for business information
markets. The battle for the future of business information
has just begun in earnest, with no clear winners in sight
but with many "old guard" attitudes from both camps in dire
need of ejection from the scene. |
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Getting to take in the entire
Buying and Selling eContent conference in Scottsdale,
Arizona as well as the
ABM Digital Velocity event in New York City last week meant
a redeye flight and some funky train connections but it proved
to be well worth the effort. BSeC has always strived to
attract both key providers of content and technologies for both
media and enterprise markets and enterprise content purchasers,
and it seemed to have met that goal very well this year. But
there were also some grumblings from some folks that major
dealmakers were largely absent from this conference. Perhaps
that's what happens when you actually get down to real
conversations with your markets.
It's also what happens when enterprise-oriented publishers
are already executing on long-established plans to support
business information requirements through greater integration
of their content into enterprise workflows. This was echoed by
at BSeC by keynoter Clare Hart, President of Dow Jones
Enterprise Media Group, as she outlined how Dow Jones is
focusing on their enterprise accounts. From low-latency Dow
Jones news feeds encoded to enable automated securities trading
to Factiva's suite of products to service corporate sales and
strategy specialists Dow Jones doesn't need a conference to
tell them how to listen to customers: they do it every day.
Corporate information professionals may still hold the keys to
content licensing but today's enterprise business information
services are steaming past them to sell strategically to the
line executives who need their information to succeed.
By contrast the ABM Digital Velocity event featured
presentations and discussions from B2B media executives trying
to convert their traditional publishing operations into
online-first operations that respond to their audience's
expectations for more sophisticated business information. This
conversion to digital operations was underscored by the tagline
in the new American Business Media logo: "The Association of
Business Information Companies." One logo change does not a new
industry make, but it was clear from the ABM Digital Velocity
event that B2B media publishers are tooling up to provide a
more powerful value proposition for many of the same corporate
clients that traditional business information database
publishers have long coveted. The conference highlighted how
B2B publishers are pushing hard to embrace advanced content management
services that enable flexible content repurposing and
organization - a change that cuts
to the core of their long-established publishing cultures, but
a necessary step for building broader business information
revenues.
Clearly there are new lines of battle being drawn for
business information spending. Once there was a clear line of
demarcation between database publishers intent on capturing
enterprise subscription dollars and B2B media companies pushing
editorial products through print and online presences. Today
those lines are starting to blur - with major consequences for
both database and trade journal publishers ahead. Here are a
few of the key themes coming out of these conferences that
underscore this evolving battle for the future of business
information:
- Traditional licensing is dwindling as a revenue driver
for publishers.
Corporate information professionals continued to discuss the
ins and outs of content licensing at BSeC but many of the
solutions being highlighted at the conference were products
that made money on value-add services at a user's desktop far
away from information professionals. Publishers get pushback from aggregators indicating that
they're not really making much money in content licensing, and
they're right - they make it on the value-add services from
which publishers do not take a proportionate cut. At the same
time B2B media publishers are moving to provide more
sophisticated online services that can act as end-to-end
business solutions, pushing past the database publishers to get
the direct attention of the same corporate users bypassing the
corporate libraries. Content licensing will continue to be an
important strategy for publishers but as the role of
information professionals as licensing gatekeepers dwindles
expect new channels for licensing to evolve towards
self-service content aggregation by enterprises and
individuals..
- Look for more deals that cross enterprise
and media markets. The frustration
experienced by financiers looking for deals at BSeC might have
its roots a fundamental disconnect between an old guard that
saw media and enterprise markets as distinct opportunities
and a new guard intent on merging them. This is not to
say that enterprise-media mergers are going to abound
overnight: to the contrary, most media companies are having a
hard enough time figuring out how to get reasonable metrics
for online publishing that will please advertisers and
marketers, much less to figure in enterprise subscription
services. But as demonstrated by the recent dramatic
growth in Reuters media revenues even as they develop very
specialized products for enterprise financial information
services growth is going to be a lot easier for business
information companies that have mixed enterprise/media
revenue models over the next several years.
- Social
media will be the brass ring for profits. In the middle
of this scrum is social media, embraced tentatively at best
by most business information publishers but clearly a growing
force. The Digital Velocity conference pointed towards fast
growth in readership of existing social media offerings by
B2B media companies; where readership and content grows, so
will revenues. While LexisNexis' inclusion of
selected weblogs for its databases and Factiva's Insight tool
mining weblogs point towards more advanced thinking from
database publishers, for most business information database publishers social media
is barely on the horizon. The business information service that
owns a market's conversations will own the best revenue
opportunities for that market: social media is going to be
the key to those revenues. While database publishers have a
leg up on integrating social media into enterprise operations
it will be a challenge for many of them to attract crowds in
ways that come fairly naturally to B2B media operations.
While both database publishers and B2B media companies have
major challenges in moving ahead in business information
markets these two conferences seem to point to both camps
pushing hard towards improved products and services for media
and enterprise business information markets. Who is the "old
guard" in this mix? Whoever isn't intent on being the new guard
- regardless of how they're serving their markets. Good luck to
all!
-
John Blossom
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