LinkedIn's growing success is both admired and feared by many in the content business, but the rap against them for quite some time has been, "Well, yeah, but where's the monetization?" In truth LinkedIn has been growing revenues steadily through traditional brand ads, partnerships and payments for premium services. But with two key moves LinkedIn is raising the bar on its prospects for revenues - and for a potential exit at a more appreciable price.
The fist LinkedIn initative is its new DirectAds service, which enables LinkedIn members with profiles to produce simple text ads on a self-service basis that can appear in other members' profile pages. Similar in overall concept to Facebook's SocialAds program - a link to the advertiser's profile appears in each ad to ensure that marketing is on a conversational basis with a known entitiy - DirectAds has the added benefit of being able to target executive peers in the LinkedIn network with a great deal of granularity - and charges healthy but affordable minimum rates to do so - a $25 minimum for a flight of ads, with impressions based on a variable formula. Filtering options include many of the criteria found in a typical member's profile, including the ability to limit ads to specific geographic regions.
The potential for DirectAds is very strong within LinkedIn itself, but it also has the potential to provide B2B publishers with some real concerns as this evolves. Though there is no announced plan to take DirectAds off-site into other publishing venues, certainly classifieds in B2B journals and Web sites could be easily targeted by LinkedIn with its extensive network of top-shelf executives and salespeople. More importantly, it's not too hard to imagine that a B2B publisher seeking revenues from companies trying to get a message through to very specific executives would jump at the chance to use DirectAds to get rates far higher than classifieds for its very targeted profiling capbilities. In very tightly knit B2B communities DirectAds would play very well in B2B publishing venues. Technologically, it would not be hard to implement at all - it would only take enabling a B2B publishing site with Google's OpenSocial API. With such a combination DirectAds would have a Google AdWords/AdSense revenue combo for on-site/off-site revenues that could be impressive indeed. If done properly - hopefully avoiding Facebook's pratfall with its Beacon program that released private data in a user-unfriendly manner - this has the potential to be to B2B publishing what Google was to consumer publishing, turning advertising into relationship building with one click of the mouse. With its potential for ultra-precise targeting, it could put somewhat of a dent in marketing lists services as well in time.
The other interesting new program at LinkedIn is the LinkedIn Research Network, which leverages some of the concepts that it employed in LinkedIn Answers to provide a tool that can enable executives to conduct peer-to-peer industry research. As in LinkedIn Answers members of LinkedIn can pose questions to peers in the LinkedIn network, using LinkedIn's extensive structured and unstructured member profile data to zero in on just the right people to target for questions. The Research Network provides its users with a workbench to monitor responses to questions and to in effect build research panel who can be contacted for additional questions.
The revenue hook in Linked in Research Network is its use of LinkedIn's private InMail network to contact members. Members may use InMail for contacting up to 20 people at a time, presumably to cut down on "spam" research requests and presumably to make it easier to meter the pricing to a reasonable block of minimum requests. Of course, one can sign up for InMail at any number of premium levels, so the real hook is to promote InMail premium subscription revenues as much as possible. Given that the demo video was intent on saying that this product was targeted primarily at financial industry analysts trying to contact experts in companies and market sectors, perhaps their initial expectations for its use are limited. But clearly its ability to combine the art of research into the art of marketing will make this a popular option for many over time.
With both of these options LinkedIn is taking a relatively low-key approach to product development, moving relatively slowly to ensure that their most valuable asset - the trust and security that the LinkedIn system of opt-in relationships has protected through its development - will not be tainted or abused. Executives are a conservative bunch when it comes to dealing with their personal reputations, but LinkedIn has proved to more than 20 million professionals so far that it is by and large a very trustworthy environment. With that trust as a primary asset, it's likely that LinkedIn has set the stage for some solid revenue development that is likely to upend a few B2B applecarts in the long run. For the time being, though LinkedIn is just at the begininning of what promises to be a long battle for the rights to what professionals value most in carrying out their business - trusted relationships that can yield revenues.
There's the usual spate of moans and groans about print profits coming out of the Argyle Executive Forum on Leadership in Media, according to Red Herring, which featured insights from many key figures in today's news media markets. This negative outlook is underscored by News Corp's withdrawal from bidding for New York area newspaper Newsday based on it being "uneconomical" and setting the stage for a potential takeover of the paper by Cablevision. While revenues continue to climb from online content at news outlets classified revenues are still highly vulnerable from online competitors, making it hard to translate growing online audiences into profiles that resemble print.
There's not much new in all of this, to be sure, but I was interested in the following comment from the Argyle conference:
Norman Pearlstine of the Carlyle Group told attendees that newspapers enjoyed a brief period of monopoly that attracted investors and convinced many families to take their businesses public. However, he said, for most of its history, the newspaper business did not enjoy the double-digit margins that characterized the 1980s and 1990s. “At the end of the 19th century there were 29 newspapers in Chicago,” he said.
In other words at the end of the day perhaps the consolidation in the print industry of the past fifty years or so, first in response to rising fixed labor costs and television competition and then from the Web, created an illusion that highly capitalized media operations would yield superior results in an industry that has historically favored diversity in lower-margin operations. By creating larger swaths of exclusivity for fewer brands in major markets, newspapers and other print outlets were able to attract advertisers for several decades and provide reach at the same level of television markets. But in doing so they never really addressed the lack of technologies that could deliver higher margins except through higher production volume. This created an artificial illusion of technology scarcity that helped to drive both margins and the expectations of people creating print content. As long as there was a steady stream of companies to acquire to build up the illusion of scarcity, this worked rather well. But we seem to have come to the end of the run of worthwhile mass market print acquisitions. Big will probably get bigger yet if government regulations allow it, but to far less avail.
By contrast, the Red Herring article highlights how Playboy Magazine was one of the very first to invest heavily in Web technologies and to learn how to make them both profitable and attractive to advertisers and audiences, including heavy investments in online video and multiplatform delivery. The result: a highly profitable and attractive operation that offers some unique appeal to online audiences based on both content and branding. Instead of focusing on acquisitions in a sea of abundant competitors to create more artificial scarcity, Playboy worked to create something more appealing what would create quality that would be hard to replace.
Another important contrast comes from a recent MediaPost article, in which Ken Doctor points out that local newspapers are still doing fairly well, in part because many local advertisers as well as audiences have yet to be able to leverage a confusing array of online options effectively. This creates a real scarcity of audiences focused on local online content that are easy for advertisers to attract with some scale. Online alternatives are catching up fairly quickly in terms of content quality, but until GPS-enabled advertising services grow more sophisticated local print will continue to offer a ray of hope for print.
The bottom line is that it's far from clear that major media outlets as we know them really need to exist as they have for the past fifty or so years much longer. If the historical state of content is a wide variety of focused outlets with relatively low revenues, low volumes and low margins, then maybe what online publishing is beginning to usher in is simply the return of publishing to its more normal state. The difference with current markets is that electronic content aggregation makes it relatively easy for a wide variety of publications to leverage common technology. For example, individual weblogs such as ours use a tiny fraction of the power found in Google's Blogger.com infrastructure. So by focusing their capital mostly on pure infrastructure, Google has created true scarcity of highly scalable publishing capabilities that can service both localized and broad audiences very effectively.
Notably even companies like Google go out and buy market share through acquisitions - online video outlet Blinkx is rumored to be on their short list of short-term possible acquistions - but these tend to be acquisitions that bring in both unique technologies and unique audiences. Where major media companies look mostly at reducing costs through online and print publication consolidation, the Googles of the world stay focused on creating more unique product value through acquisitions. With such an insistence on sticking with old metrics for performance it's not clear that established media companies can commit their capital effectively to gain a market advantage as long as they continue to focus on creating more artificial scarcity for dated products and dated delivery technologies. In the meantime private equity abounds to fund technology platforms that will take away the best opportunities for a wide variety of producers content with higher margins on lower volume and advertisers pleased with more focused audiences.
In other words, it's very unclear where the news industry goes from this point if they don't want to invest far more heavily in new electronic product development for more focused audiences. With a sour economy making it all the more hard to raise more capital for investment, expect media titans to continue to wrestle with their place in a content market traditionally dominated by smaller, more agile and more innovative players.
UPDATE: I wrote this entry yesterday originally, focusing on the Hulu launch versus HDTV. Any coincidence that today TiVo launches a direct interface to YouTube accounts? Perhaps not. Post is updated to reflect this new announcement.
A significant wedding anniversary gave our family a reasonable excuse to replace our aging and failing television with an HDTV set which arrived yesterday. Having suffered through years of the old set's fuzzy screen and scratchy sound it was quite a shock to experience faces as big and clear as life and wonderfully crisp audio. But while the senses were definitely doing backflips thanks to this not-so-little toy the cable box still had the same number of channels to flip through, with the same stuff as before - just better looking and sounding. As amazing as the technology behind it may be, it's still just a glorified monitor.
At the same time the world is bracing for tomorrow's much-ballyhooed debut of Hulu.com, the online television portal that will provide DRMed video content from NBC/Universal, News Corp and a network of 50 other providers already pumping out video through its own portal and partner sites. Staci Kramer at paidContent.org notes that there are already more than 50,000 imbeds of the Hulu player at 6,000 Web sites, with content from more than 250 TV shows and 150 clips from major shows already in the archives. It's superficial social integration, but it's a start.
In other words, Hulu is a good step forward for mainstream media outlets to adopt the cable programming model to online markets through user-assisted contextualization of secure content players, enabling a wide proliferation of places in which one can encounter their video content, albeit without any ability to mash it or otherwise do much of anything with it. Archives will also be a little problematic, apparently, with current shows not necessarily being available online indefinitely - at least until they pass off into another economic lifecycle through syndication. In the meantime, Silicon Valley Insider notes that many old-time television shows have found enthusiastic new audiences on the Hulu service, including old chestnuts such as the 1950's series "Davy Crockett" and a less successful 1980s series "Airwolf."
The concept for Hulu has matured quite a bit and is likely to experience a fair amount of success, in spite of its proprietary player dampening the service's ability to integrate much with its partners' platforms. Just the ability to search through archives of traditional TV shows should enable people to gain more breadth in their television viewing far more easily than ever before. But as always old business models hold on to television production like boat anchors on the QE2. The introduction of materials on the service is likely to be slowed by producers concerned about how it will affect DVD and syndication revenues, in spite of the fact that audiences will be more able than ever to reach the content that they enjoy most when and where they want it. In the meantime more than 65,000 videos are posted on YouTube daily, gaining more and more of people's attention bandwidth and creating a competing "long tail" of monetizable content.
Hulu is certainly a step forward for TV producers in search of increasingly distributed audiences who seek out content in the contexts that matter most to them , maintaining a "walled garden" of sorts that replicates the closed loop of content typically distributed on cable TV networks. As it succeeds, though, the services that it's most likely to impact - cable and satellite distributors - may want to ask themselves a key question: why aren't we doing a better job of providing content when and where people want it? With TiVo having announced a direct interface to YouTube downloads and HDTVs having the ability to interface directly to PCs the envelope of on-demand content that's accessible to cable and satellite TV viewers is going to have to become a priority for these companies - as the Web side of their facilities consumes more and more bandwidth for video delivery.
This brings me back to that brand-new HDTV in our family room. It's great that we can see all of these channels more clearly and even get a smidgen of content via on-demand services, but why is there still virtually no integration between cable services and the Web? Why can't I find some video that moves me on the Web, click on an icon next to my "email to a friend" and "embedding code" links that will queue it up for viewing on my HDTV in a TiVo/DVR device? Years after the introduction of TV monitors capable of managing digital video content there's almost no interactivity with those devices and the Web, save for a handful of enthusiasts who hook up their PCs to their home theatre systems. I'll enjoy it for what it is, but it seems as if the most sure-fire way to make sure that cable and satellite TV systems remain relevant is to improve the integration of TV and Web services.
Hopefully Hulu gives cable and satellite companies enough competition that they'll start thinking more seriously how they're going to be able to leverage a Web that's far better able to locate and serve up interesting video content from millions of sources worldwide. As it is the digital interfaces to modern televisions offer home audiences a wide variety of options for people to bypass the monotony of cable viewing and find the content that's most relevant to them in brilliant displays that may or may not require old business models to pay for them.
Instead of focusing on a few hundred channels, most of which are of almost no interest to a particular person, cable and satellite providers should be focusing on being the most efficient download services possible to enable set-top units to be filled with lots of programming that's of high interest to a given audience - then tailor advertising and other services to the downloader, not the program channel. It's a day that's coming sooner rather than later, hopefully - that is, if cable and satellite providers can outdance the Hulu craze and recognize that if they don't out-TiVo TiVo the days of hundreds of subscription channels is definitely numbered.
There are some basic patterns that seem to repeat themselves through the publishing industry, one of them being the relative attractiveness of subscriptions in a down economy and the relative attractiveness of ad-supported publishing in an up economy. With the global economic cycle already beginning to cut into online advertising money and that money spread across more high-quality online inventory than ever, it's not really a surprise that there's some reaffirmation of subscription models at Dow Jones. As noted in The Wall Street Journal, News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch underscored in comments at the Davos World Economic Forum that Dow Jones would be continuing a subscription component to the WSJ's online offering, even as it expands its free offering to a far broader online audience.
Dow Jones has little to lose and quite a bit to gain by trying this "guns and butter" approach to online monetization. With about two million affluents and influential online subscribers, WSJ offers strong demographics to advertisers who would otherwise be left to compare only WSJ's open Web assets with other quality online content. WSJ will hold its own with those competitive products, to be sure, but why toss out higher ad rates if you don't have to? By expanding both search engine exposure to much of WSJ's online content and continuing to build an online club for elites there's reason to think that the Journal is headed towards a comparatively robust year of growth.
The main question is, what will keep the subscribers coming back for more? We've mentioned in earlier posts that the subscription component could be used to leverage WSJ's upscale demographics in any number of social media-oriented efforts, as well as to offer financial analysis tools that would one-up offerings made available by Yahoo! Finance as well as premium offerings from Morningstar and other online suppliers. Whatever the changes they need to be oriented more towards a younger generation's needs if they are to use subscription revenues for anything more than the temporary bulwark that the TimesSelect premium experiment turned out to be.
Any way you look at it it's not clear that there's a core of traditional editorial content from any news publisher that's likely to sustain growth in online subscriptions in the long run. The tricky job that Dow Jones has on its hands is to project the value of its brand more globally via ad-only content whilst maintaining some sense of value in its exclusive subscription product. Dow Jones has much to gain in retaining its subscription model as it expands ad-only content, but they will be challenged to keep the value of the Wall Street Journal brand high unless there are new styles of content that can build on the existing brand's loyalty.
When first I arrived on Wall Street many years ago at a major financial information company I was totally captivated by the notion of real-time news and information being at our fingertips every moment of the day. While other people lived through events in a seemingly second-hand world of news we were in on the cutting edge of events at all times. Reporters leaping over one another to cover these events in our newsroom was a given, and a thrill to watch as they shaped the news for leading investors worldwide.
But times change. Today what we used to consider elite real-time news is what most people on the Web expect to get as a matter of course, while traders in financial circles measure information timeliness that can give them a trading advantage via "hot news" in sub-millisecond timeframes. The Associated Press' CEO Tom Curley painted a picture of this evolving landscape for news in a recent addressat the annual Knight-Bagehot Dinner in New York. In his address Curley was quick to chide "editors [who] need to stop pining for the old world and intensify the leading to the new" and to suggest that news organizations' "focus must be on becoming the very best at filling people’s 24-hour news needs." He also outlined how AP bureau offices would be staffed with more people dedicated to creating news rather than distributing it. Certainly moves such as these will help AP to generate quality news cost-effectively. But Curley fell short in his defining the scope of a number of key parameters that would help real changes to come about.
A key unrealistic expectation that Curley advanced is the role that distribution management plays in online content: "We have the power to control how our content flows on the Web. We must use that power if we’re to continue to be financially secure and independent enough to speak truth to power." It would be more accurate to say that publishers have the power to understand how their content flows on the Web. Yes, through proper packaging a publisher can employ business or legal measures to enforce some commercial arrangements over that flow in many instances, but the notion that a wire service or any other content distribution service has the ability to control distribution on the Web definitively is not only inaccurate but a folly for growing a business.
With the exception of high-end professional applications such as securities trading the ability to monetize news lies far less in its ability to be distributed and far more in its ability to be contextualized. "Hot news" without a hot context is just not hot - especially when the hot contexts far outweigh the relatively small handful of contexts that used to exist through distribution-oriented media outlets. With social media creating millions of highly personalized contexts for news it is to a publisher's advantage to maximize distribution in the most cost-effective manner to those contexts. The brand value is not in the "AP" logo next to the headline or lede but in the value that it provides in the moment. While copyright in those contexts is certainly worth defending if you make the brand less able to flow into the contexts in which news can be monetized most effectively you reduce the opportunity for revenues substantially.
The New York Times understood this well enough when it lowered its subscription barrier to TimesSelect content and the Wall Street Journal appears headed towards more such exposure. Curley's suggestion of introducing tiered pricing for "hot" news versus hours-old news may have some value in this regard but if others are adept at making money without such a scheme it will be hard position to defend except at the highest end of enterprise markets. The general abandonment of 15-minute delayed pricing for stock tickers on television and the Web points towards an environment where the ability to monetize news on an exclusive basis has disappeared in large part from consumer media. It's about value relative to what else can be created in a medium, not just what you feel is valuable independent of that medium. The fault lies not in the Web but in the reluctance of publishers to embrace monetization models beyond distribution control. "Speaking the truth to power" does indeed cost money, but it doesn't seem to ring true that this necessitates the primacy of one particular monetization model. AP has begun some experimentation with viral distribution via embedded content which is a hopeful sign for future efforts. But in an era in which the world edits its own front page and in doing so assigns value to news an organization creating news must adjust its expectations and acknowledge that speaking the truth to power also requires the active cooperation of those user-editors to make that truth relevant to power.
It's not just a matter of protecting copyright in a social media environment: it's a matter of being the master of monetizing social media through the inherent strengths of its contexts. Where value is created, monetization - and brand authority - follows. To insist that monetization and brand authority must be respected regardless of their relative value in new contexts leads inevitably to a degradation of both monetization and brand authority. Monetization isn't the real protection of quality news, it's really the creation of a defensible value proposition that protects quality news. The money - and the security to speak the truth confidently - comes from people valuing what you have to say in the most open marketplace of ideas available.
This is the inherent shift in publishing that continues to leave many in the industry not only at a fork in the road but well behind others who didn't even bother to look for the fork. It is, you might say, the difference in shifting an outlook from the East side of Manhattan to the West side versus shifting an outlook from the East coast to the West coast of the U.S. (or any other source of publishing innovation). Be a master of value in these new contexts, says the West coast, and the East coast time and again says, "Show me the money" - which sounds great and practical, except when the West coast comes up with so many new contexts that can make money that they are dumbfounded as to where to start to pick off what turns out to be sloppy seconds for monetization.
The solution to this problem lies in part in recognizing that the East coast crowd needs to be the master of monetizing contexts that the West coast creates, not the follower. Instead of sitting back on their heels and sending in a licensing team after the lawyers have roughed up a dot-com baddie established players in publishing need to think, "How can we be the next Google of content monetization? How can we be outrageously on the front lines of helping people make money from content that gets consumed the way that people want it? How can we create content packaging that is so compelling that it cannot help but to make money?" With an increasing stream of large media companies cutting deals for contextual ad networks you can see that they are starting to get a hint of what this is all about, but it's still mostly about putting up ads and not really about owning the most compelling value proposition that makes people want to advertise.
An example of this can be seen in the abandonment of print as a valuable medium. Curley suggests in his speech, "There’s still a place for appointment media -- a home-delivered newspaper on the porch each morning or an evening newscast while making dinner. But it is a smaller place. People, of course, want the news when they want it." While print's lack of exclusivity is hardly news, most publishers have been utterly uncreative in their approach to print as a highly valuable medium. Print is a medium for the most tactile and high-quality physical engagement with content: its value will be long-standing. An organization like AP has the ability to enable technologies that would allow consumers and enterprises to get highly customized print publications that would be highly affordable - and highly valuable to marketers. Instead, publishers crank out the same old proprietary content instead of putting the selection and the editing in the hands of their readers.
If this sounds as if I got up on the wrong side of the bed you may be right, but only because it is really frustrating at times to see how slowly major media companies adapt to these trends - frustration that is shared with many people working for those companies, I can assure you. There are scarce few that have had the courage to innovate with the fearlessness that's required to become a winner in the 21st century content world. AP may yet be one of those survivors under Curley's leadership as he strives to reinvent a culture that has much of which to be proud, but that equally needs to put aside that pride and acknowledge what the real goals must be for a news organization in the 20th century. AP's worldwide network of journalists and member organizations has an opportunity to reinvent the value of news around contexts rather than distribution, and many of the skills to make that so. But time is of the essence...
You have your choice of horror stories to choose from as AT+T sends out its first service bills for Web access via Apple's iPhones. USA Today covers an active text messager who had her 300-page bill delivered in a box (YouTube video below) while a design consultant who got socked with roaming charges for Web access had to cough up USD 5,000 to settle his everyday use of the mobile web. The culprit in both instances is message units, with AT&T's by-the-byte metering making single-page Web downloads as much as USD 20 per page or more in some instances. With rates like this one can only wonder what mobile Web carriers would have in mind if they decided to start adding on fees for high-traffic Web sites as some of them are proposing for general Web access.
While AT&T dismisses these as extreme examples of billing charges the fact of the matter is that it's indicative of how little phone carriers have come in accepting what creates value in content access today. We have had more than a decade of flat-rate Internet access services and increasing use of free or flat-rate telephony to accelerate the growth of electronic publishing but still the major carriers want to play by the old rules - to the long-term detriment of publishers. The most likely consequence of this early application of inflexible metered billing is to heighten the appeal of proposals before the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to make new frequencies available for broadband wireless access more open to competition and transparent access to content and supporting services.
The same threats to revenues faced by publishers as telecommunications companies try to impose tariffs on land-line Internet access are already in place in a mobile marketplace that will represent an increasingly significant portion of publisher revenues - if we can get beyond USD 20-per-page Web downloads. AT&T's clumsy handling of billing may back-handedly do publishers a great favor by letting them see both the promise of a device like the iPhone and the inordinate restrictions for its use to access the Web. Publishers know already that print revenues will no longer fill the bottom line as before: it's time for publishers to push aggressively in the U.S. Congress for a more open, flat-rate approach to mobile Web access that will help them to build online revenues as quickly as possible and to promote more accessible and profitable mobile services that will help them to do that more effectively.
Om Malik notes along with many of the technology media digerati the recent expulsion of image hosting site PhotoBucket's content sharing widgets from the MySpace social media portal. The grievous charge against PhotoBucket? Ads. Along with content from the widget embedded in a MySpace page the viewer would get a PhotoBucket-provided ad. So in a twinkle of an eye PhotoBucket loses a distribution partner for its social media content. Mind you there's some pretty sad irony here in that MySpace gets content free from its millions of users and ad-free partners to generate ad revenue with near-zero editorial expense. It would seem only fair that MySpace recognize that others who are contributing to their revenue successes need to be compensated also.
The rub in this equation is revenue sharing. Unlike ad-supported mashups like TheNewsRoom.com, which shares its ad revenue with distribution partners, PhotoBucket somehow didn't think it proper to compensate MySpace for the "rental" of their context to display its revenue-generating content. If they were a little more savvy PhotoBucket would have approached MySpace ahead of time and proposed a revenue split based on MySpace-embedded ad revenues. If they were more than a little savvy PhotoBucket would have set up a system similar to TheNewsRoom that allows distribution partners to set up a self-service license for ad-supported content. In either case both MySpace and PhotoBucket have shot themselves in the foot by eliminating a popular content feature that was adding value to audiences in MySpace.
We've been talking for several years about how contextualizing content and not just ads would become the next great online revenue opportunity, so the storm of widgets invading social media properties should come as not surprise. But in an era of user-defined aggregation there needs to be a more automated regimen for determining when and how revenue-generating content can play alongside other commercially-supported content. With users constantly defining new contexts in which to share widgets and other embeddable content forms neither the services providing venues for those widgets nor the distributors of the content can afford to waste time in traditional licensing negotiations. The value of the contexts is far too fleeting to make them pay off effectively in many instances.
Content producers using widgets for distribution also need to think more carefully about how to structure their offerings for partners with different commercial outlooks. Some content could be made available through free-only partners and additional content for those willing to allow ad-supported or fee-based revenue sharing. Whatever the regimen content producers taking advantage of social media tools to embed their content in various contexts need to remember that advertising is all about selling contexts, not content. When a widget or other social media tool is embedded in another site the value of the context requires both the content provider and the site provider to recognize that the value of the context created by these tools is the sum of both parts.
As more and more users embed content in platforms of their choice media companies need to acknowledge that portals are not always going to be the play that gives them the best promise for contextualizing their content. We need to get to a point where we could have a MySpace widget that also embedded a PhotoBucket widget where a user wanted it. This is the new form of aggregation that will be most likely to pay off for publisher in the long run. All the world's a TiVo, so get your content ready for it to reside wherever it needs to - and to partner with whomever is there who has a right to share in the profits.
