Somewhere in the world today a printing press operation is preparing to go dark. Mind you, it's not a universal phenomenon; in markets such as India, where a burgeoning middle class is hungry for news and not yet equipped with an abundance of electronic media sources, print media is actually growing. Scholarly publishers are still doing well their premium journals and custom print for B2B and consumer markets is thriving. But in many developed media markets print operations are struggling to stay alive, with 2010 expected to be a year in which newsstands begin to display significantly fewer titles. Barnes and Noble, with its Nook ebook reader, offers free wireless in their stores as a bundled part of the service, trying to encourage both browsers and coffee-drinkers to make more use of their "big box" stores real estate. It's a Web-eat-paper world, and the publishing industry is wearing newsprint shorts.

Labels: aggregation, B2b media, consumer, Custom Printing, Google, media

When News Corporation took over Dow Jones two years ago, it was quick to move out key senior Dow Jones managers and move in its own team that had a vision for how to make the brand a profitable and thriving outlet for business news and information. At that time I said on ContentBlogger, "The opportunity is for News Corp to enable a more aggressive melding of enterprise and media services as the differences between today's business media outlets and today's enterprise portals begin to narrow." I also speculated at the time whether Dow Jones Enterprise Media head Clare Hart would stick around to become a player in this mix or move on, suggesting that at least for a time she was respected enough that it was worth her hanging in there.

Labels: B2b media, Business Information, clare hart, consumer, Dow Jones, enterprise, Factiva, News Corp, NewsCorp, Wall Street Journal

In the process of selling off several of its core B2B entertainment industry titles, Nielsen Business Media also announced the eminent closing of Editor & Publisher, the century-plus old trade publication that had chronicled the ins and outs of the news industry. At a time at which magazine closings seem to be about as regular as train stops on a commuter line, E&P's demise is not exceptional in many ways. Any number of trade publications are struggling to survive in an era in which online media enables unlimited competition for the attention of its readership and for its advertisers' and subscribers' cash. But there is something particularly poignant about E&P's shuttering. After all, if an industry which insists that the quality of its content will be its distinguishing factor cannot support the high-quality journalism covering itself, then how can they expect others to do likewise for their own interests?

Labels: B2b media, Custom Printing, editor and publisher, magazines, print, Publishing, Web

While Mark Logic is far from the only game in town for cross-platform publishing technologies, its recent Digital Publishing Summit at the Plaza Hotel in New York City was a huge down payment on establishing itself as a thought leader that could merge the best of East Coast and West Coast thinking in enterprise and media content markets. As one would expect with a vendor-sponsored conference, the day was filled with "friendlies" who use and support Mark Logic and its XML-based databases, APIs and content delivery services. But it if you had to pick friends, CEO Dave Kellogg and staff picked some friends who had excellent examples of how cross-platform and cross-source publishing is "the new normal" that is helping to drive value in the publishing industry. The trick is, though, is that this new normal is filled with some ironies that the content industry is still struggling to absorb.

Labels: aggregation, B2b media, BusinessWeek, BX, consumer, content, crovitz, databases, magazines, mark logic, mcgraw-hill, nejm, textbooks, xml, zinio

I've been suggesting to my friends at Dow Jones for more than five years that they needed to consider how to use their Factiva content more aggressively on the Web as a source for virtual aggregation of news and business information. Well, five years isn't that long in enterprise content product cycles, I suppose, so when I tweeted the announcement by Dow Jones of its new Wall Street Journal Profession Edition yesterday morning, I was pleased to see that the WSJ had finally started to package licensed content from Dow Jones Factiva's news and business information database into an editorially-managed online edition. The WSJ Pro package will be strictly a premium offering, offered at first only to Dow Jones' enterprise customers starting in November, with wider availability expected next year.

Labels: B2b media, Bloomberg, Business Information, Dow Jones, enterprise, Factiva, News, prosumer, thomson reuters, Wall Street Journal, WSJ Pro

At first it might appear as if some people in the magazine industry are in dire need of searching for their sanity when you first read FOLIO:'s article on a spate of new magazine launches in recent weeks. Certainly print media has its fair share of die-hards, and, well, when it's what you do well and you want to keep doing it, it's not likely that you're going to stop any time soon. But as much as there's that never-say-die strain to print media these days, there's also a lot of sense to many of the efforts that are being undertaken these days to launch new print titles.

It wasn't until late 2007 that a switch tripped in my head and I realized I needed to flip the expense/revenue picture upside down. Instead of thinking about how to generate more cash, I needed to figure out how to create a news operation that could exist profitably based on a reasonable expectation for local online revenue.

In a market where the newspaper newsroom might cost $10 million, I knew how to make $1 million online, or even $2 million, but I didn't know -- and still don't -- how to make $10 million.

So if I can make a million online, why do I need operate a $10 million newsroom, especially given the greater efficiencies of online publishing?

Labels: B2b media, magazines, online, print

In the beginning, there was the CPM - that enduring measurement of how many thousands of people were exposed to an advertisement as a benchmark for gauging its value. But with the rise of online advertising, CPM impression measurements began to compete with metrics such as Cost Per Click, the number of people who actually used a link on an ad to visit an advertiser's Web site. Here at last was a metric that proved that online advertising really worked - even though relatively few people actually clicked on these ads.

Labels: advertising, B2b media, comscore, consumers, display, enquiro, First Research, Google, media, opa, Social Media, Social Media Club

When Gordon Crovitz left Dow Jones several months ago, I knew that his experiences in helping to build the most successful premium online news brand would be likely to result in good things somewhere. Gordon’s insights into the value of traditional journalism and his online savvy are an unusual combination in the world of today’s content industry. So it was with some interest that I have been learning about Journalism Online, a new initiative captained by Crovitz, content industry veteran Steven Brill and former cable industry CEO Leo Hindery. In a detailed press release – more of a mini-business plan, actually – the Journalism Online (JOI) team has outlined a multi-pronged strategy to enable traditional journalism to reap new revenue streams from online sources.

As many of the elements of the JOI plan are in sync with what Shore has been advocating for many years to promote the health of premium content sales (I briefed Crovitz on the concepts of The New Aggregation about five years ago), I would be contradicting myself to say that his team’s plan doesn’t hold water. In fact, much of what Journalism Online advocates is sorely needed in the news industry and will be likely to offer professional journalists a chance to benefit from more sensible online business models in tune with how content is actually distributed and consumed online. However, there are some troubling aspects in both the details and the broad brush of this plan that should be considered carefully by publishers as they weigh its merits.

The first concept in the Journalism Online plan is really a no-brainer and long, long overdue. JOI would set up an online system that would enable anyone to sign up once for access to premium news content across the Web. Payment models via this system would vary, and would include subscriptions for individual premium publications, pay-per-view access and royalty-driven payments in a cross-source subscription model. This would enable any publisher participating in Journalism Online to share in common payment and billing infrastructure that would make a wide variety of premium business models possible. While JOI does not target mobile and television markets explicitly, clearly this is a system whose basic cross-source payment model based on open Web access can be easily extended to other content delivery networks.

So far, so good, most especially on the cross-source royalty model. In essence the Web is a broadcast medium that enables people to tune into multiple streams very easily, so tuning premium content delivery into a payment model more like radio’s royalty payment system for music producers is a strong plus. When specific content becomes very popular online, the spike in views of that content can result in direct revenues to its producers. In theory this helps to resolve the ongoing dilemma of having to expose content to search engines that’s monetized with ads that just don’t seem to take advantage of oftentimes brief spurts of interest in news items to the point of paying the bills for many publishers. If the QPass cross-platform payment system of ten years ago had not flopped by trying to control content distribution via their service we’d have had this type of payment management service in place years ago.

The next leg of Journalism Online’s plan is a little more shaky. JOI has put under its wings two of the most prominent legal talents in the U.S. – former Microsoft anti-trust attorney David Boies and former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson – to lead some strong-arm negotiations with search engines and online aggregators to pony up licensing and royalty fees for the right to link to JOI member content. While one has to respect the considerable judicial, political and corporate gravitas of these two legal heavies, I am concerned that their efforts seem to be misplaced. There is now a substantial body of law which makes it clear that indexing a link to a headline is not a crime and falls comfortably into the concept of fair use of copyrighted content. By the logic outlined in Journalism Online's stated focus they should be suing newsstands in cities across the world for exposing the headlines of newspapers to people walking by, or charging millions of dollars for copies of the venerable Periodicals Index on library reference shelves. I believe that this tactic is in large part a sop to news publishers who have been relying thus far on the Associated Press’ failing negotiations with Google and other search engines based on similar issues.

Strong-arm legal tactics for search engine licensing are also largely unnecessary, in large part, if the JOI system works as it ought to. Access policies could be enforced on all participating publisher sites, and terms of bulk access licensing could be managed for search engines and other corporate entities from the same system that services consumers. It’s more likely that the JOI legal team is a stick for the carrot of negotiating some meaningful price points for bulk indexing access – price points that are likely to disappoint many publishers, since the search engines know that news ad revenues would die without search engine links. What’s more promising is having legal and technology infrastructure in place that could facilitate bulk relicensing of content for reuse in new content aggregation schemes such as online mashups and in enterprise software applications.

The most concerning aspect of Journalism Online, though, is the sense that their team harbors a dogged determination to preserve the status quo at traditional news media outlets in the face of more than a decade of change fostered by online access to news. The following quote from Brill seems to set the tone for much of what JOI is trying to accomplish:

“We’re also convinced,” Brill added, “that readers, who have been paying billions of dollars a year for print journalism, will continue to support journalists by paying a modest, fair price for original, independent, professional work distributed online. They realize—as we do—that quality journalism is a vital component of a functioning democracy and free market.”

While I would agree that many people are willing to pay a premium for high-quality products and services, the implication in Brill’s statement is that they are out to support the journalists creating the news in a way that will sustain the traditions of print journalism. Given that many journalists caught up in newspaper cutbacks now have to accept wages that are getting closer to those offered for low-level services jobs while many media executives continue to do rather well by themselves, I think that it’s fair to say that the merits of the print journalism model's ability to support journalists are largely at question. This sales pitch for Journalism Online is not so much about preserving journalists as it is about preserving some portion of the lavish profits once enjoyed by a news publishing industry that no longer has near-exclusive access to publishing technologies. A “modest, fair price” doesn’t sound like the type of monies that will support glitzy skyscrapers that were paid for by those technologies. Promises and realiteis seem to be out of sync in this instance by a broad stretch.

In sum the Journalism Online initiative holds out a great deal of promise for the news media to revise its thinking on how to acquire revenues more realistically in an online environment, albeit with some sentimental froth around the edges of that promise for those not quite ready to accept the true value of news in today’s online publishing environment. In a world that has empowered over 1.6 billion people as publishers, it’s no longer realistic to think that only a handful of people who carry the official title of “journalist” are defining the supply of quality information and insights in the world. The key factor that Journalism Online really doesn’t address at all is that the news industry is surrounded by valuable sources of information that leave them struggling to define a fundamental value proposition, regardless of how it may be financed. News organizations are also surrounded by technology platforms that make it possible for consumers and enterprises to aggregate, filter and analyze news far more efficiently than via their own publishing platforms. The “let’s tame Google” approach to trying to control content linking and access belies the reality that the contexts in which news is most valuable are increasingly far away from publishers’ own Web sites. There's some tacit acknowledgment of this concept in the JOI positioning, but only time will tell if they can emphasize licensing of content for reuse efficiently enough to make a real difference for news producers who must compete with and complement new sources of engaging news and information.

The search for subscription and royalty payments fostered by Journalism Online also tends to gloss over the ad-driven culture of most of today’s news organizations that restricts fairly radically what topics and personalities gain their attention in their search for an increasingly limited “truth.” If JOI could help fund a broader approach to journalism that gave coverage to less ad-worthy topics, then truly it would be living up to its ideals. It’s far from clear, though, that the news organizations that Journalism Online intends to support are likely to maximize the funding of such “news for the sake of news” journalism any time soon, though. But as an alternative to AP’s trenchant response to online publishing, it at least offers some hope for the news industry as a whole as a means to overcome some of the challenges posed to it by online content distribution capabilities.

Labels: B2b media, brill, crovitz, Google, hindery, Journalism, journalism online, Licensing, media, Monetization, News, Newspaper, royalties, search engines, subscription

I enjoyed this year's SIIA Information Industry Summit and Previews events very much; there were great presentations and great discussions throughout the two-plus days in New York. However, I was a bit disturbed by some of the gossip I heard percolating in the background about the successes of Congressional Quarterly that were highlighted by CQ's president and editor-in-chief Robert Merry in his panel presentation. Under Merry CQ went from being one of many challenged niche Washington print publications into a highly successful for-profit online subscription service with a healthy array of complementary of online and print publications. The undercurrent at the conference was along the lines of "Well, that's easy for him to say, he works for a non-profit." Sorry, folks, while the non-profit Poynter Institute owns CQ as well as The St. Petersburg Times via parent umbrella Times Publishing Co., Merry has had to work towards a profit component as much as any other publication.

Such critiques are especially ironic given the announcement that TPC is now looking to sell CQ in order to raise cash that will allow its beleaguered St. Pete Times to stay afloat. Politico has a particularly meaty take on the proposed sale, with lots of insider quotes. The bottom line of this deal is fairly simple: CQ is a valuable asset, will sell as soon as there's money available to buy it and is the baby being thrown out to rescue the soiled bathwater that is today's consumer newspapers. It is akin to The New York Times' recent decision to lease out real estate from its new building to raise operating cash for its newspaper, but unlike the NYT, TPC has decided that it's better to hang on to a dying publication and to let go a publication that's done its homework on how to survive in a very tough market niche.

At least TPC is making an honest attempt to try to figure out a working business model for newspapers in a post-print era. By contrast, The New York Times went to print with an op-ed piece by David Swensen and Michael Schmidt which claims that today's news organizations should be subsidized as non-profit organizations. The op-ed piece lays out the facts of the news industry's woes objectively enough, but then it adds this nugget:

By endowing our most valued sources of news we would free them from the strictures of an obsolete business model and offer them a permanent place in society, like that of America’s colleges and universities. Endowments would transform newspapers into unshakable fixtures of American life, with greater stability and enhanced independence that would allow them to serve the public good more effectively.

Perhaps with bailout fever in the air news organizations are feeling that they should join the Washington gravy train and try to get a permanent government subsidy. If so, this would be both extremely ironic and highly unlikely, given Washington's relentless cutbacks on public radio and television outlets, which have lost the lion's share of their government subsidization and which do not have the extensive international correspondent networks that Swensen and Schmidt claim are in need of subsidization. From crowing about "cash cow" profits to going hat in hand to governmental organizations seems to be an unlikely transition for most major media companies, especially given their recent tendency to play high stakes M&A games on highly leveraged dealmaking at the expense of staff and product development.

In one sense the concept of endowing consumer news journalism is a sound one; we should be making it easier for good news to be collected in a way that puts less profit pressure on news organizations. The truth of the matter, though, is that this is happening anyway. In addition to some news organizations teaching people in local markets how to help them in collecting news, the marketplace is encouaging startups that are filling the gaps left behind from the media industry's dilution of news coverage. Emma Heald notes at Editorsweblog.org the progress of VoiceofSanDiego.org, an investigative journalism startup funded by contributions from the greater San Diego, California community and from the Knight Foundation. VoSD.org has the flexibility to produce investigative journalism without the pressure of advertising, but that's not the only solution to filling in the revenue gap required to produce important news. More partisan outlets such as The Raw Story have periodic fund drives to help close the gap between modest online ad revenues and what it takes to field journalists who are willing to pursue commercially unpalatable news.

So although it is romantic to think that news organizations that have tried to be blue-chip stock plays can become well-disciplined investigative news organizations at the wave of an endowment wand, the reality is that there is a new generation of investigative news being produced both by professionals and citizen-journalists independent of those media companies. News will survive and thrive in the online world, to borrow from the title of Content Nation, but not necessarily in the hands of organizations that are the product of the era of mass production. Much of it will be produced for free or for the purposes of people who choose to support it either through endowments for through their good will in producing it. But news will continue to be produced for a profit - if its producers can understand that the content industry is entering the post-industrial era. Mass production still has value, but the most value in the publishing marketplace is in the mass-production of highly contextual information and experiences. The key to the survival of publishing is to focus on monetizing the contexts, not the "things."

In some ways the consumer news industry understands this in their improved focus on search engine optimization, contextual ads, better content engagement and better integration of content generated by its communities. But at the heart of the gap between yesterday's more robust revenues and today's more meager online revenues is a failure to monetize contexts efficiently. Some of that gap can be closed by a standardized approach to micropayments, but in large part the proliferation of news on many topics from online sources and independent aggregators of news links means that there will always be fewer contexts that traditional news organizations can monetize. So yes, get those endowments if you can find them, but don't expect that you'll support the same kind of news organization with them.

All of this brings us back to Bob Merry's great historical insights on the news industry. He noted at the SIIA Information Industry Summit that prior to the rise of today's "objective" news gathering organizations in the industrial 19th century there was a robust array of smaller and more partisan news organizations from which people could pick and choose insights on the topics of the day. In this fray, few news rooms would claim to have the "objective" view of the truth: people would have to assemble that on their own through studying the sources and discussing them with others. In Merry's view the industrialization of news to produce a standardized consumer commodity was a relatively brief phenomenon in its long-term history. In other words, perhaps what we are seeing in the news industry is not its undoing but rather its re-doing into its more native form.

CQ can expect to find an eager buyer soon enough, and the consumer news industry as a whole will turn into whatever free markets want it to be soon enough as well. I do believe that it would be a mistake to subsidize today's news organizations as they have existed in recent decades. This would be as large a mistake as countries that have subsidized other inefficient industries in the past. Instead, we need to continue to ask the question of major consumer news publishers, "Which part of the word 'change' is it that do you not understand?" Let's endow new business models for consumer news such as new approaches to micropayments and community-supported news generation methods that serve people as they want to be served. The rest will take care of itself soon enough. In the meantime, the successes of CQ underscores the point that a good publication in a good niche will always have a fighting chance. And in any business it really is all about the fight, after all - isn't it?

Labels: B2b media, congressional quarterly, Deals Partnerships and Sales, newspapers, Robert Merry, subscription, washington

In years past one could visit the head office of Bloomberg, L.P. and peer into the newsroom right off of the main lobby. Mike Bloomberg's office was right off of that news floor, with a glass partition that segregated him about as much as a head of an investment bank trading floor is separated from his or her operations. This was a natural for someone whose career took off in the trading rooms of Merrill Lynch driven by traders responding to real-time news events, but it also underscored the importance to Bloomberg of making authoritative market-moving news a key component of its success.

Times change, and now Bloomberg has announced the appointment of Time Inc. and Wall Street Journal veteran Norm Pearlstine as their first Chief Content Officer, a move that one presumes will enable Bloomberg to leverage its news and data assets more effectively in rapidly changing professional and consumer business news markets. Certainly this will help Bloomberg to move its revenue base more heavily away from professional markets, where its ubiquitous content displays are encountering fewer seats in an increasingly automated and specialized securities trading industry.

As I've noted for several years the financial information industry, like many enterprise content sectors, is moving away from a "bell curve" market model, in which lots of money is made off of many people equipped with subscription content delivery, to a "U"-shaped market model, in which lots of money is made off of highly automated content services and highly analytical services for a small cadre of decision-makers, with your typical "seat" revenues being realized more profitably through a media model where delivery has been commoditized as a benefit. Bloomberg has been relatively slow to respond to these changes, sticking to its highly profitable professional products but only recently beginning to up investment in its media brand audiences.

That's a challenging formula for growth given the continuing evolution of both Thomson Reuters and Dow Jones in supporting media markets more aggressively. Bloomberg 's online operations have grown audence significantly in the past year, almost doubling its online portal audience, but still trails Reuters and Dow Jones significantly for global markets. Thomson Reuters reported 18 percent quarter-on-quarter growth in its media sales in its first combined reports, an indication of how its global presence in online news markets has helped to fuel profits. So while Bloomberg's online, television and licensed content is strong, there is room for growth, especially in overseas markets.

But undoubtedly the increasingly sophisticated presence of Dow Jones has to loom large in Bloomberg's radar as much as the newly combined forces of Thomson Reuters. News Corp has managed this acquisition very wisely so far, retaining an online subscription base that both Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg lack while beefing up its Enterprise Media Group with its Generate acquisition. As these kinds of products that create professional value out of media sources begin to be adopted to Dow Jones' online media offerings Bloomberg will be challenged to devise both more powerful media offerings and a subscription community willing to pay for them. This will be at least as tricky as building a global content brand out of its existing news operations. The real challenge for Bloomberg is to respond to both new opportunities for media revenues and new challenges to high-end content analytics and real-time sales intelligence services in its core markets from newly strengthened players such as Dow Jones.

Pearlstine brings a deep and impressive legacy in the content industry to Bloomberg, but more importantly he brings an outlook on the media business which recognizes that the days of a handful of news monopolies dominating news gathering and dissemination are drawing to a close. To succeed with an electronic news brand one must not only excel at traditional journalism but as well one must excel in making news valuable in whatever context an audience finds it to be valuable. While it's not clear that Pearlstine's insider view of the media industry will lead Bloomberg to new successes in adapting to this more contextual view of the content marketplace he is likely to help open doors for Bloomberg to build out a more competitive brand for both online markets and for print markets seeking out new sources of editorial content.

Labels: B2b media, Bloomberg, financial information, media, News, Norm Pearlstine

The ABM Digital Velocity event had a typically insightful array of B2B trade publishing specialists talking about the block-and-tackle world of helping print publishing brands become electronic more effectively. There was also the usual frustrating mix of people who really "get it" seeded into a general industry outlook for B2B publishing which may be looking for better answers but which oftentimes has a hard time framing the right questions.

One good example of this problem can be seen in the realm of video production for B2B publications. The panel focusing on this topic acknowledged that video was important but to them the cost of getting telegenic people and high-level production standards expected for professionally produced videos was not worth the expense. Yet a corporate marketer on the same panel was pointing out how they had whipped up some nifty promotional footage on their industrial products that was getting some good play when they uploaded it to YouTube. It sure sounded to me like these were two ships passing in the night - one assuming that their job was to produce all of the content that a marketer needed and the marketer saying that what they really needed was context.

Yet when I suggested to the panel that perhaps B2B publishers could help marketers place their corporate video footage on their sites for a fee this was shrugged off quickly as a suggestion of "advertorials." I'm trying to be charitable here, since there is a good amount of use in B2B publishing of user-contributed videos, but have these people ever looked at their Google search results and seen that little column off to the right labeled "Sponsored Links?" Has it occurred to these people that audiences understand the difference between sponsored content and unsponsored content and now are open to having clearly labeled mixes of these available on a Web page?

It would seem that corporate video is an ideal way for publishers and marketers to solve a mutual problem. The publishers see the production of video footage as distracting them from their core editorial function (which is, as I understand it, telling a story the best way possible, but we'll leave that one alone for now). The corporate marketers spend lots of money producing such video and are learning how to make them both informative and appealing. Instead of spending money on old-fashioned "creative" for ads that sell brands the old-fashioned way why not let marketers allow their prospects to step inside their brands via topic-oriented videos embedded in B2B sites? Instead of trying to flag down people with an instant's worth of attention via advertising have them hang around with your brand inside the topical video in the same space in which you'd normally put an ad - and, of course, pay the B2B publisher for that right.

There are certainly services such as TheNewsMarket that are already flush with corporate video and which could with just a little imagination be combined with a contextual ad network service such as ContextWeb to make it easy for this footage to be monetized in spots where normally ads would run. Alternatively, of course, publishers' ad sales forces could offer better deals to marketers for premium placements and special creative to enhance its ability to provide sales leads.

B2B publishers are moving far more rapidly to put the right technology in place to be successful in online publishing but more than ever they are butting up against long-established job functions and business roles that need to be rethought dramatically. It's not just a matter of combining online and digital sales forces or going digital-first in your content production. It's also about understanding that the nature of your pie that your trying to slice online is fundamentally different and changing rapidly.

As B2B marketers succeed increasingly in creating their own valuable content and using "prosumer" channels such as search engines and YouTube to reach those audiences traditional B2B publishers have to accept that the essential nature of their editorial function has changed irrevocably. These publishers have to look to their marketing clients for contextual content as well as brand messaging if the more conversational nature of online publishing is to reap its full rewards under their umbrellas. Similarly they have to become more adept at enabling both their own content and content from marketing partners to be contextualized elsewhere on the Web.

I saw a number of very hopeful signs at the Digital Velocity event which tell me that B2B publishers are investing in digital publishing more aggressively but their fundamental issue remains rethinking what their industry is really about. Just plain missing the opportunity to make good use of corporate video seems to be one important example of this disconnect. These companies have the resources to invest in change but in a marketplace in which publishing brands are becoming far less focused on the "mystique" of established titles and more on how they help people get things done new opportunties seem to be arising that will allow new players to engage B2B publishing as a market sector more effectively. If established B2B publishers aren't willing to rethink their pie then others will certainly be very glad to reslice it for them.

Labels: ABM, B2b media, Digital Velocity, thenewsmarket, video

When I arrived at the the ABM Digital Velocity event Tom Cintorino, SVP for Digital Media for PennWell Corporation was chairing a panel on revenues at the ABM Digital Velocity conference, which focused on how to drive revenues in the digital era. The key factor that struck me in listening to this panel was that the margins found in online B2B media - approaching 85 percent in some instances - are becoming a very attractive incentive for publishers to sell online ads and services far more aggressively.

Yet while Tom put out a hypothetical 1/3-1/3-1/3 ideal for a current revenue mix between print, digital and events few in the audience raised their hands to say that they were anywhere near that mix today. So although publishers are moving rapidly to push online revenues and starting to combine print and online sales forces aggressively the traditional dominance and allure of print for B2B publishers has hardly disappeared.

Yet I heard a lot of hopeful trends from the panelists and people in the audience which indicate just how much velocity towards digital services is entering B2B trade publishing:

• One publisher talked about how they were in an interesting quandary - they had to change their sales incentives plan for selling print advertising because the sales force was focusing so much on online sales. It may be kind of ironic to be having to subsidize flagship print titles to keep sales foces interested in them but it's really about leaving no money on the table - publishers can't afford to have advertisers say "Well, you're our online strategy, we'll use your competitor for ptint." That leaves to big a door open for competitors to expand from their print base into online sales later. So print will be a decreasing revenue stream but one which publishers simply don't want to let go of as a strategic investment for some time to come.
• One person in the audience noted how in construction services print titles are still very important to architects who still need and appreciate the high quality of graphic presentation that print affords them - and that appeals to their clients. However, when it comes to finding suppliers and solving specific problems in their trade they go online aggressively. So even where print services the lifestyles of specific audiences in specific modes, online is the focus for advertising and marketing that captureds people in a mode that advertisers will value highly - and that provide concrete and detailed metrics of campaign performance.
• Sales lead generation is becoming a key strategy for B2B publishers, so much so that one panelist noted that that sometimes they will have to tell potential clients that their ad campaigns really won't work on their platforms. The good news for those marketers though is that the ability of online B2B publishing to return great sales leads is proven and strong - a campaign that returns 300 leads for high-end B2B products may result in around ten percent of these suspects being converted into prospects.
  
• Converting print sales forces can be challenging: looking at the third-third-third revenue mix suggested by Tom is also a roadmap as to how many in traditional sales forces might not be able to make the leap to online sales. But publishers were offering stories of veteran salespeople who they thought would never be able to make the leap into online sales working off of laptops on wireless connections doing online presentations. Thinking of many of the great veterans from the early days of financial trading technologies who had to make the leap from "ticker" sales to sophisticated system sales it's a hard transition to manage for many. But in industries where relationships are built up over many years these transitions may be needed at times to ensure stability at major accounts while still enabling more online sales. Nevertheless, one of the major pain points for publishers is to realize that they are not in business to keep a sales force but to solve their clients' needs.
• This panel highlighted that one of the problems in making the transition to online sales is to recognize that it's no longer a brand sale as much as it is a product sale. Marketers are looking for vehicles that produce results: it's no longer as ephemeral as the appeal of a print title that is based on many intangibles and relatively few advantages in the product platform itself. This is very hard for publishers raised on the mystique of print brands to accept. The product is now not just what's on the editorial side of the wall.
  
• This need for looking at publications as products was highlighted also in the next panel on new technologies, where eMedia consultant Mitch Rouda highlighted the need for traditional publishers to embrace a concept that's familiar to many other industies and still somewhat foreign to them: product management. Who is to fulfill that role today in publishing? Editors to some degree, perhaps, but whatever the solution the "throw it over the wall" solution to technology hasn't worked for digital native publications for a long time and print publications are struggling on this cultural divide.
• A B2B and Media Business indicated that investment in print for B2B publishers was expected to decrease for 45 percent of respondents in the 2008-2009 time frame, with just a handful expecting an increase. A marketer's panel pointed out that this isn't automatically mean that marketers are getting what they want for online: they're less interested in CPM and other online concepts than they are in lead generation. Increases in online investment, though, are still fairly conservative according to the B2B survey, with increases of 10 percent expected. Granted that's a good chunk, but with the open-ended investments being pursued by private equity players in online-only publishing one wonders if it's really going to make enough.
  

The gaps are closing between what B2B publishers need to do and what they are actually doing to build stronger revenues from online media. But it's safe to say that many publishers have a legacy of old methods and outlooks that are still having a hard time making the transition to a more client-oriented and market-oriented approach to publishing product developmtn. In the final panel of the day the questoin was raised about how marketers could place an industrial video in an online publication and provide a new form of content and community just didn't register with this crowd. The discussion shifted rather rapidly to how to manage print sales.

I am more hopeful than ever that major publishers will be able to thrive through this transition but the small to medium portfolios of trade magazines who may have a harder time reinventing sales, technology, events management and editorial staffs all at once are certainly at risk in this transition. Here's hoping everyone gets their digital velocity souped up as soon as possible. You may have "ink in your blood" but it's time to start breathing the same air that your marketing and advertising clients need to breathe.

Labels: ABM, B2b media, Digital Velocity, events, revenues