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

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 have to chuckle a bit at the recent Poynter Online email interview with Wikimedia Foundation's Jimmy Wales, in which he discusses an internal memo gleaned from Associated Press (PDF) by Nieman Journalism Lab. The AP memo, entitled "Protect, Point, Pay - An Associated Press Plan for Reclaiming News Content Online," covers a lot of ground already familiar to those following AP's efforts to put in premium packaging for news content. However, in addition to conjuring up long-standing concerns about Google and other major search engines as competitive forces, the memo also highlights AP's concern about the millions of topic-oriented pages in Wikipedia that are capturing traffic when people search for breaking news. At last the light bulb begins to go off in some minds that perhaps the issue is not so much search engines but that search engines are directing people towards the most popular destinations for specific topics. Hmm, perhaps this might have something to do with...the quality of the content that they find there?

Labels: aggregation, associated press, Google, Jimmy Wales, News, Nieman Labs, Poynter, Wikipedia

There have been any number of content aggregation services surfacing in recent years that have helped publishers to expand the richness of their Web sites. APIs, feeds and other tools are helping publishers to power up new online presences that offer new opportunities for ad revenues and audience building. But as the marketplace for news begins to revolve increasingly around passing topics, it becomes harder to use such tools to respond rapidly enough to revenue-generating opportunities. The "bogie" for this new model often mentioned is The Huffington Post, which has made an art of whipping up special sections of content and links from a wide variety of sources focused on headline-grabbing topics wrapped with its own layer of editorial content from bloggers. How do publishers respond to this model with their own instant feature sites?

Labels: aggregation, content, daylife, Publishing

Building on Wednesday's launch of free individual and bulk company data from Jigsaw there's an announcement from business information provider Hoover's on its addition of more than a million new contacts for mid-level executives in major companies from an unnamed third party source (but given which service is focused on harvesting mid-level contacts from sales professionals it's not too hard to figure out). Pull up the record for GE, for example, and Hoover's provides access to more than 4,500 employees, now including employees from subsidiaries as well. That helps to cut down on the "which of those doggone divisions is he/she in?" conundrum that can slow down the search for appropriate contacts. With company records becoming increasingly commoditized this emphasis on contacts data integrated in with its Hoover's Connect social media feature is a key component of Hoover's future.

The other neat function is the ability to add one's own profile into the Hoover's business information database, somewhat along the lines of what ECNext is doing with company information on their Manta platform targeted at small to medium sized enterprises. Add in your bio, education, memberships in associations, add an option to receive contact via the Hoover's platform and it's off to their editors for final review and posting. You have to go looking for the feature way down on a company page, but it's there and is a start towards enabling the gathering of the kinds of valuable information that LinkedIn and other business-oriented social media services are enabling.

Overall Hoover's continues its efforts on reviving the once-flagging brand that had been turned into a cash cow by D&B just about the time that it needed serious new investment. The need to turn the cow into a star again is now clear at D&B and many of the efforts are starting to pay off. Long a leader in pressing the envelope for online workflow design, The Hoover's interface manages to present a ton of information and a wealth of features in a highly usable form. The real question seems to be, though, when and how often people will visit the Hoover's portal - or any heavy-duty business information portal.

Business information tools like Zoominfo beckon with a Google-esque simplicity to its ad-supported design and fairly rich features, if with less in-depth content, from its subscription-level service. The growth of Zoominfo in particular seems to be putting a damper on both established business information services and up-and-comers as it aggregates content harvested from with web with licensed content supplements. Part of Hoover's response to this "stickiness" issue is to highlight their editorial staff via topic-oriented business blogs that are featured prominently on the ad-supported front page and elsewhere within the site. It's an innovative move, but one that seems to be still looking for a big payoff in improved site traffic.

The main problem that Hoover's and other business information services face is that it's hard to keep on heaping on great portal features and expect to get commensurate returns on the investment in those features every single time. With a wide range of contexts in which people want business information on a personal and professional basis the ability to integrate content in contexts far beyond one's portal becomes a key factor for building the brand value of business information. At the same time there are more opportunities to use the value of contexts in a portal such as Hoover's to gain more lucrative positioning of ad-supported content. Instead of having some mass-market ad show up when someone with a known business profile is looking at a company's information, isn't that the perfect opportunity for that company to tout itself or to have related B2B products and services crop up from a ThomasNet network or such? The ad value of business information is still very underappreciated and under-exploited.

So overall the Hoover's portal continues to make healthy strides forward but it must continue to build innovation in a year in which the economy makes "pretty good" free or more targeted substitutes more popular than ever. Both the short-run and long-run track for Hoover's continues to offer challenges that they must battle, but at least their sword is getting sharper in order to take them on.

Labels: aggregation, Business Information, hoovers, jigsaw, Manta, Zoominfo

Read/Write Web notes a hue and cry rising up from bloggers who are concerned about their content being appropriated by aggregation services such as Shyfter that take blog feeds and develop ad-based services using their content without bloggers' approval. Bloggers are apparently concerned that aggregation services are stripping off revenues from their ad-supported services. I suppose that there's more than one publisher chuckling on the sidelines of this affair as bloggers by the bucketful begin to discover an uncomfortable fact - if you decide to be a publisher via social media there's no magic spell that removes one from the problems that all publishers have. Commoditization, unfair use and redistribution of content without verifying a publisher's rights in a new context - these are common complaints in the publishing industry as a whole. This is, unfortunately, where many social media platform providers have fallen short.

Quick to create new features to embed content and to distribute it, many social media platforms have fallen short in their ability to help people monetize their content effectively. Yes, we've had contextual ads on blogs for years, but in essence contextual ads are telling bloggers and other social media creators using them that there's enough demand to sustain their publication on mass media ads. Unfortunately this is rarely the case - the supply of social media content is vastly greater than the demand for media-scaled ads and programs such as AdSense, while beneficial, will not pay huge dividends for most bloggers. It takes blogs with large, media-scaled audiences such as TechCrunch to sustain business with the existing advertising tools. The irony here is that as some social media properties have grown to such proportions they are recognizing that they really have the same problems as any other mass media-oriented property. Aggregation without licensing for commercial purposes draws off a blogger's revenues as much as it does a major newspaper's revenues. In Content Nation the problems of traditional publishers have become the problems of social media publishers, and vice versa.

Companies such as Newstex help bloggers to benefit from companies who want to play by copyright rules and license social media content, but in general there is little to be found in most standard weblogging packages that help a publisher to capitalize on the value of their content in contexts other than their native Web site. Some of the solution is better standard features for bloggers - technology such as Attributor can enable a publisher to track content usage more easily and relicensing services such as Copyright Clearance Center's RightsLink and iCopyright can help companies to manage content relicensing opportunities more effectively. And on Near-Time, the platform that we use for Content Nation, there is the capability to define subscription access to content, a "gated community" that sets a bar for both content access and creation as desired. These types of tools are the basic "block and tackle" for any online publisher today, whether in social media or mainstream media, to ensure that they understand who is using their content and making it easy to establish good commercial relationships with those valuing content to make money through content aggregation or reuse.

Unfortunately the technology for social media ads and licensing is really only addressing one part of extracting value from social media. Individuals such as myself build value for focused audiences that gets converted into marketable value other ways - through consulting engagements, through the sale of research and other services that we provide. Other people look for more broad social transactions, building a reputation and relationships that can be converted into personal or professional brand value on any number of conversational and tribal levels. Be it positioning yourself for your next job or promotion, fostering a willingness to participate in events and projects, giving or receiving endorsements or just being tapped into the things that you really love, social media creates value in ways that advertising and licensing don't begin to encompass.

What's really needed to help make social media more successful are better tools to extract value out of social relationships when one's content travels into contexts away from their own home base for their social media. For example, when my blog is picked up in a feed reader, I'd sure like it if there were an easier way for me to embed offers from other people in my social networks that were valuable to them as well as to me. Some of these might be monetizable, others more purely social, but it's the weak point for most ad networks - they assume that transactions have to be based on mass marketing rather than personal marketing. This is one of the reasons why marketing events, services and publications via Facebook is becoming increasingly popular - the groups and people who congregate there are explicitly opting in to relationship networks, making marketing on any level far more effective when done as a member of the community.

So my condolences to bloggers who are burning out as their dreams of big-media glory come face to face with the true nature of electronic content. If you came to glory because you were glad to have free distribution and never demanded any better of your social media platform providers, then shame on you. But as important as it is to have better tools for commercialization through aggregation and reuse it's more important to think about the basics of how to create value in social media.

Labels: aggregation, Licensing, Social Media, weblogs

Sramana Mitra at GigaOM tries to makes sense of the recent reorgs, cutbacks and general malaise at Yahoo. Mind you it's sometimes hard to figure out how people can cluck about a company that has over 500 million unique audience members, but clearly a USD 20 billion loss in market capitalization since its peak is bound to bring soul-searching in many major company. Sramana's suggestion is for Yahoo to focus more on excellence in specific vertical markets rather than to get lost in trying to out-everyone everyone else. Oddly Sramana gives as one suggested change the addition of photo processing service Shutterfly to Yahoo's Flickr photo community, even though Flickr has had the QOOP photo printing service for some time now.

This points out a major problem that many content aggregators face: it's almost impossible for an all-singing, all-dancing content vendor to buy enough good content to compete cost-effectively with specialists in any one market vertical. Yahoo could buy its way into a more dominant position in verticals such as travel, jobs and real estate classifieds by purchasing market leaders and then position management that wouldn't stop until they had dominant positions, but there are only so many verticals in which one can dot this effectively and still manage to maintain both rapid responses to market needs and the advantages of scale. Thomson has discovered this to a large degree as it has chosen to divest itself of market verticals in which it was both not possible to dominate effectively and to take advantage of common infrastructure for legal, scientific and financial markets more deeply.

The main problem Yahoo faces is that its brand does not resonate effectively with many of its holdings as well as many of its core offerings. In terms of breadth of content that it licenses or manages there's no single provider larger than Yahoo in online markets. That's a fine position to be in if you're a Google with a brand that is functionally oriented more than vertically oriented, but when you're more about destination content it's hard to get a broad encompassing brand to work for both functionality and destination content - even when there's comparable functionality or content available. People gravitate to Google for search over Yahoo as much for branding reasons as they do for its technology: that is, Google is a "techie" brand, so it's viewed more as a tool for solving specific problems. Yahoo has great content, but with a handful of exceptions it's not really seen as a tech tool intuitively. Strangely Yahoo's focus on well-designed user interfaces only seems to exacerbate this branding issue. By looking more user-friendly and idiot-proof than Google and other tech-oriented brands it continues to send signals that it's a company focused more on destination content than leading-edge content technology.

I'd hesitate to call Yahoo a dying brand, for it has a wealth of assets that are hard to beat in many arenas. But it is a brand in search of its soul, captive in large part to an earlier generation of the Web when aggregating content from existing media brands seemed to be a lot more powerful business concept than it is today. Google's more agnostic approach to content aggregation and more askance perspective on marketing alliances with established content brands has enabled to keep its content acquisition costs relatively low and its ability to focus resources on transformative technologies and approaches to markets relatively high. In an era in which a brand creates trust moment by moment Google's more contextual and flexible approach to brand management carries with it inherent advantages, as do many social media brands focused on transformative technologies.

Yahoo need not become another Google from a branding perspective, but it does need to think about the positioning of its brand far more carefully before it tries to focus on improving existing product lines that may not be well aligned with a repositioned Yahoo brand. I remain optimistic that this can happen over the next few years, but I don't expect a short-term turnaround.

Labels: aggregation, portals, vertical search, Yahoo

The Associated Press' position in the news world is in some ways stronger than ever, building on both traditional newspaper portals and the growth of online-only news venues such as Yahoo, Google and social news outlets. But it's also a challenge for AP and other wire services to define a path towards long-term growth as the variety of outlets that can generate and distribute news on the Web outside of their purview accelerates. An earlier lawsuit against Google for their use of news from AP on member sites yielded a settlement in AP's favor, so it's no surprise that AP is trying again with a new lawsuit against Moreover, Verisign's content mining service for media and enterprise clients.

In the AP statement on the suit AP notes that AP discovered the extent of Moreover's practices while negotiating with it to provide content management services to the AP's members. Oops. The main bone of content seems to be that, like Google, Moreover is fairly efficient at harvesting news from AP from member sites for its clients, claiming that headlines could be appearing in Moreover within two minutes of their hitting a news Web site. This hits a little too close to AP clients who want to be the source for breaking news headlines. Adding to AP's perceived pain is Moreover's revenues gained from ad-supported and subscription services, including what AP claims is Moreover's use of story texts and photos.

Cleverly the suit claims that Moreover's uses of headlines violate fair use laws by merely copying them instead of transforming them into a unique form and format. Given that fair use is used primarily for publications to use limited direct quotation of sources in news articles and other original works this seems like a stretch at best in relation to fair use law. By this definition any page of search results would be suspect, even though one could argue that each page of search results represents an original work of authorship through its organization of content into a unique compilation as proscribed under U.S. Copyright law. Search engine companies have been reluctant to test this concept in courts, however, as globally the interpretation could vary significantly. So this type of threat has been an effective tool for brining technology companies to the bargaining table for AP.

Although AP's suit covers no apparent new legal ground it's use as a negotiating tool targeting a content harvesting company is an important new wrinkle. Although Web mining technology is in many ways little different than search engine crawlers its use to build applications beyond mere search results means that more value-add applications based on these technologies are becoming targets for copyright enforcement. It opens up many questions for both Web miners and providers of mashups and embedded content services. Services such as Sphere, which serve up embedded link references through its own crawling services, have become very popular with publishers trying to provide value-add content links to their sites, and these could become potential targets for AP-like lawsuits as well. Notably AP is targeting relatively mature businesses but with its use of the Attributor content tracking technology any service could become a target potentially.

While AP may have some legitimate foundations to their concerns at the end of the day this is yet another company with distribution at the heart of their content business model struggling to understand how to position itself in a marketplace where distribution is in essence a free service. Like music publishing companies trying to position the value of their services for potential clients AP's aggressiveness in monitoring and pursuing potential copyright infringement provides them with a legal enforcement angle to their content licensing services that can help to justify premium prices for their services. But also like music publishers may come a point when the talent recognizes that they're pretty good at making money without distribution-oriented middle men.

But AP is far smarter than music publishers in pursuing licensing deals through their surveillance efforts with companies that are likely to be able to pay in proportion to the commercial value of their services. Notably Moreover was an early entrant into content harvesting so its relatively mature base of enterprise and media clients gives AP a reasonable target to pursue that's more likely to settle on commercial terms than to go to the mattresses to defend matters on principle alone. In this sense AP is approaching situations like the Moreover suit as a rather aggressive business development effort - one that's not likely to endear AP content to the burgeoning embedding industry but one that may have some commercial effect for now but which may erode interest in AP as a business partner over time. In the meantime the stage is still wide open for virtual aggregation services that manage copyright issues effectively for both enterprise and media services to keep suits like AP's from becoming licensing nightmares.

Labels: aggregation, AP, copyright, fair use, harvesting, legal, mining, Moreover, suit

Reuters reports the news story on CNN's elimination of Reuters as a major supplier of news and video footage, but the story behind the story provided on the Reuters MediaFile weblog gets to some of the meat of the matter. An internal CNN memo surfaced by MediaFile from Editorial Director Richard Griffiths details the sudden and troublesome transition that CNN must manage. The termination of using Reuters content is immediate and global and must include purging clips of Reuters video footage from archived video segments. Though the official story from CNN that it is deciding to make "significant investments" in its own news gathering operation to counter the loss of Reuters content there is some speculation that this is more of a cost-cutting measure or a "play tough" negotiating stance on the contract for syndicated Reuters content.

The truth is probably somewhere in between these two stances. It's hard to imagine that CNN, which has relied strongly on Reuters content for most of its existence, is going to be able to fill the gap easily for coverage lost through dropping Reuters, especially as it impacts their archives so deeply. If this is a strategic move, then one would think that the strategy would have accounted for these losses more smoothly.

To some degree the claim that news feeds and video footage from suppliers such as AP can help to fill the gap may be a major part of the CNN strategy, but the larger factor seems to be how the increasingly context-dependent nature of Web content is changing how content brands are managed online. In dropping a major syndication source such as Reuters CNN is acknowledging that aggregating content from other premium branded suppliers does not necessarily help a publisher to score well in metrics managed by comScore and other audience measurement services that look increasingly at how content gets consumed away from a portal.

This is underscored by portals such as CNN making more aggressive use of their own feeds to users via RSS, search engine positioning and other techniques that are putting their content into on-the-fly contexts that users value more. In this sense, a content brand is built around what it does for an audience in the contexts that they care about most - which may or may not be the brand's parent portal.

While this gives Reuters a bit of a bloody nose in the short run it's also an acknowledgment that their strategy of using Web syndication partners sparingly is paying off to some degree as its own brand begins to gain more prominence through search engines and its increasingly sophisticated portal. However CNN's willingness to stick with content from AP and other wire services may also indicate that Reuters' once-dominant international position in news gathering is eroding to the point that it is becoming harder to position its news effectively in consumer markets. Reuters has also lagged behind AP in seeking out social media partners to build context for its content, and unlike AP does not have the advantage of a membership-driven network that relies on AP in many instances to drive branded news portals in many local markets.

All of this begs a very delicate question: is the Reuters news brand going to be strong enough to survive alone in an era in which traditional syndication is experiencing major challenges? By moving its consumer Web operations away from partners such as CNN over the past few years Reuters has tried to innoculate itself against this very question through its quest to build up non-syndication revenues through advertising and other types of business deals. But with more global news sources than ever before and a surge of user-generated content gaining more authority it is becoming ever-harder for Reuters to define that brand, a move that may be complicated by the eminent takeover of Reuters by Thomson.

Consider, for example, the fact that the far more interesting analysis of this particular story appeared on the Reuters MediaFile weblog. MediaFile is an excellent blog, but it's hardly the only one of its kind. Being able to define their brand effectively online whilst contending with both traditional and non-traditional competitors that can be exposed the the global communications afforded by the Web is going to be an ongoing challenge for Reuters and other major wire services. For now consider CNN the winner in this battle as it gains more freedom to build its brand through online channels for its text and video content, but consider both parties having to scramble to make their news strategies fly in a world of contextual content branding.

Labels: aggregation, CNN, News, Reuters, syndication

Newser is a new take on online news aggregation backed by HighBeam Research's Patrick Spain with a hand from media figure Michael Wolff. The concept behind Newser is relatively simple: use a central editorial staff with some automated support from HighBeam's search and aggregation infrastructure for premium and Web content to highlight news from mainstream media sources and from select social media channels. Newser presents a fresh face to news, with a tic-tac-toe matrix of nine lead story boxes for top news in each major category complemented by automatically generated related topics and headlines from AP news. The Newser editorial staff whips up a digest of each lead story that is complemented by a link to the underlying source, online video clips where available and links to Newser content on related topics and people in the story. News from the front page and major topic areas can be fed via RSS into a user's news reader of choice. For now Google's AdSense network provides a revenue stream.

Newser provides a lot of best practices for online news aggregation and is an attractive and well-conceived package for consuming general news content. Its editorial selections, while somewhat eccentric at times, are thoughtful and make for a nice feed of interesting reading. But strangely Newser doesn't seem to have much mojo going for it. Is it just a matter of not having the West Coast buzz that other news aggregation sites have? Lacking the right chatter is perhaps part of the story, as prominent articles in The New York Times, Gawker and other major media channels have focused at least as much on the personality of Michael Wolff as they have on the site itself. As a media figure who has had his fair share of unkind thoughts about the online world perhaps leading with Wolff's East Coast view of media is not such a keen idea.

But Newser's momentum issues are also locked in somewhat into the product itself. While the story-scanning interface is an improvement over some search engine news interfaces the tic-tac-toe look makes it very hard for the eye to focus on what's important in the news. There are things to be said for simple column layouts, even if they don't look have that catchy, Blinkx-like "wall of content" look to them. The new Netscape's tab structure for editorially-selected stories is one other option as well that could help eliminate visual clutter. This is especially important for audiences becoming increasingly used to the scrolling headlines of news feed reader services as well as for more traditional news reading audiences. My guess is that a lot of people will take a look at the product, say "huh?" and move on to the next click. It's just too hard to focus on something at first glance.

Another key factor in Newser's mix that's troubling is also one of its strengths: its editorial selections. Unfortunately the editors of Newser are anonymous, and there is no opportunity to establish a conversation of any sort in the Newser framework with editors or with other registrants. The uncertainty of who does what in the editorial process seems to leave Newser at a disadvantage to sites like Netscape, whose anchors are both known and attract supplementary news and comments from readers. Readers like to have a sense of whose hands are on the editorial process. This is accentuated somewhat by Newser's near-exclusive focus on the typical mainstream news sources, with only an occasional smattering of online news from blogs and topical portals. If Newser's primary mission is to filter mainstream news sources then they should have an editorial voice that can be held to account as MSM sources are.

But the largest factor that may be holding back Newser is that while it is a well conceived news delivery machine there are already a preponderance of ways in which people can get news delivered to them effectively in agnostic aggregations. Google News provides highly readable and relevant selections from mainstream news sources and news reading software available through Google Reader, MyYahoo!, NewsGator and other services enable people to tune in to the news sources that they select and trust most. The New Aggregation is driving news content more quickly into personalized contexts than ever before, including sites such as Netscape and Newsvine where news can be discussed and ranked through audience-driven editorial processes. In such an already crowded field for news aggregation Newser may have a hard time getting some momentum behind just competent editing, aggregation and delivery of the usual suspects.

Newser's thoughtful capabilities are likely to serve as a good platform for others who are trying to get an improved approach to news aggregation, so my best guess at this point is that Newser will wind up being acquired fairly rapidly by an online service with established audience share that's trying to improve its news aggregation capabilities. Alternatively Newser might do well by opening up its platform with APIs that will enable it to provide its aggregation services to portals and other services on a licensed basis. But without reasons to stick around at Newser itself it's capabilities are not likely to draw advertisers who are dwelling more on how long people are engaged in a given site - a factor that will favor more interactive news sites. With further product improvements and more hooks into the social media crowd Newser could develop its own following in time, but doing something that others already do pretty well a little better may not develop the fanatical following that will propel Newser to high-profile success.

Labels: aggregation, HighBeam, News, Newser

The announcement of Factiva's deployment of improved integration capabilities via browser-based Web applications is being heralded as a major leveraging of Web 2.0 technologies to improve Factiva content delivery. The new tools allow Factiva SalesWorks content to be integrated into enterprise portal applications via user-embeddable widgets into Web 2.0 platforms using technologies that eliminate having to deal with feeds into back-end server applications. This is an important step forward into allowing both enterprise users and development teams to use SalesWorks content where it matters most to them, without having to rely on expensive and time-consuming custom integration efforts. SalesWorks offers a good range of content, but as enterprises turn to a wide range of CRM applications, Wikis and other platforms as their "go-to" business information platforms services such as Factiva have to move quickly and effectively to make their content a part of those user-centric environments.

While these new integration capabilities are hardly revolutionary by overall industry standards they do represent an important step forward by a major enterprise content aggregator to move further away from its own platform to offer customers the ability to put their content where they will find it to be most useful. Much of the focus on enterprise workflow integration by aggregators has been on creating comprehensive tools to solve specific information retrieval problems. By moving to browser-based content embedding technologies aggregators can move more quickly to bring their content to users via the applications that matter in their workflows already on a day-to-day basis.

This is a sword that cuts both ways, of course: in ceding the complete workflow to other applications integrators trade off more complete integration for more quick market penetration. As penetration is the key to both retaining subscription bases and expanding opportunities for add-on marketing efforts it pays to go the embeddable route - a picture that will become more clear to more aggregators in time. Aggregation is no longer such a rarefied game - both Factiva and other content aggregators will face increasing competition from technology-oriented companies that know how to provide value-add functionality on top of many different types of business information content sets. It's a race of sorts to see how providers of licensed content sets can switch to a strategy that will get embedded in desktops securely before these other providers gain the upper hand. In the meantime Factiva has made a strong move to claim their place in the new widget-oriented enterprise desktop as quickly as possible.

Labels: aggregation, Business Information, Dow Jones, embedding, Factiva, widgets

BusinessWeek provides an excellent analysis of recent deals and acquisitions by Google, deals which are resulting in complaints from Microsoft to regulators about potential anti-trust violations as well as similar concerns about market dominance from NETCompetition.org. BW dismisses concerns about anti-trust violations in the Doubleclick deal by pointing out that their main focus is not on ad auctions: at least for now there will be no auctioning off of Google ads on the Doubleclick network. As the article notes, "Even with a Google-owned DoubleClick, publishers can still sell their display ads themselves and set the prices however they want." But the concerns about dominance are underscored by Google's announced deal with U.S. radio giant ClearChannel to sell 30-second ad spots on their radio stations via their dMarc radio advertising platform.

Well, first let's put aside the somewhat unfortunate claims of anti-trust violations from a company that owns more than 90 percent of PC operating systems and word processing software worldwide and focus on the real question: is Google creating unfair business practices? This can get gray pretty quickly but overall I think that the answer is no. The opportunity to build or buy infrastructure that makes the most out of contexts in Web content has been around for more than a decade. Where most companies opted to focus on traditionally marketed intellectual property Google has been the only leading company to focus almost exclusively from its beginnings on creating and owning contexts for content. While Yahoo is excelling in amassing content from both users and publishers it dropped the ball on search technologies many times and is only now beginning to mount a serious challenge to Google's ad technologies and partnerships. Microsoft has had extremely ample time to develop competitive challenges to Google but has chosen instead to develop a very split strategy that tries to placate status quo-sensitive enterprises and publishers while also trying to develop improving but underdeveloped search and ad technologies.

So to my ears I hear some people saying, "Hey, that's not fair, Google figured out what the leading value proposition for online content would be for the next few decades before we did." Is Google aggressive? You bet. Does some of the "don't be evil" charm wear a little thin at times these days? Certainly. Dominance can easily turn into unfair practices, so it would not be right to give Google a complete clean bill of health for all time in their acquisition plans. But for the most part the ball is in the courts of Google's competitors to build a better mousetrap. And that's the way that it should be, we're told.

Labels: advertising, aggregation, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Doubleclick, Google

In some ways it seems preposterous to be laying low the number one global destination Web site but that hasn't stopped Seeking Alpha's Eric Jackson from delivering a scathing review of Yahoo's financial performance in light of Yahoo's stock price sinking 7% for the past 2 years, compared to Google’s 151% increase. Jackson trashes just about every major Yahoo media initiative and lost deal-making opportunity in recent memory - not to mention CEO Terry Semel's half-billion=plus U.S. dollar compensation package over the past four years. Notably Jackson calls not just for the ouster of Semel but as well for the exit of six others from Yahoo's boardroom and steeper investments in R&D.

In other words Yahoo has become just another top-heavy media company trying to focus on old world dealmaking and brand advertising plays while Google creates infinite reserves of user-tailored page inventory from its search results pages and embedded ads on any Web page that wants to host them. It's not an entirely fair characterization of Yahoo, given some of its good moves as of late into social media, but it's fair enough as a reflection of how many traditional media companies have failed to put their money where the growth is. Put simply, acquiring and generating traditional content is not generating the needed page views to justify the investments that Yahoo has made in recent years leading to an overall decline in site traffic. It's going to be hard for Yahoo to make the kind of radical moves that Jackson suggests, but shareholders will be pushing them in that direction soon enough.

The hardest part of this shakeup will be that Yahoo's outlook on online media has been a major force in propping up many other media companies' hopes for being able to build traditional models for brand ad-supported content online - and in the process provide those with skills attached to those traditional methods and channels a comfortable career migration path. Ousting Semel and complicit board members is as much a slap in the face of the broader hopes of traditional media companies as much as it is for anyone at Yahoo in particular. Yahoo's significant traffic and membership assets are not going to disappear overnight, but the fundamental failure of Yahoo to fund growth in directions that build valuable user-defined contexts does not augur much for other media-centric portal plays. Here's hoping that the changes come in time to save many of Yahoo's best assets from becoming under-invested properties in a too-little-too-late belt-tightening exercise.

Labels: advertising, aggregation, earnings, Google, Seeking Alpha, Trends, Yahoo