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

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.

Labels: media, Monetization, News, News Corp, newspapers, print

The new video format wars came to an abrupt end recently as Toshiba gave up on the HD DVD format and accepted that they would have to move to the new Blu-ray format. The question may be asked, though, will consumers really care who won? I've been accumulating hardware to install an HDTV recently and going through potential support for storing content. One item that caught my eye: a one-terabyte (1,000 gigabyte) file server than can park itself on a wireless home network or a direct network connection. This little puppy will set me back all of about USD 550 online. That's about the going price for a Blu-ray disc player for a device that can store hundreds of movies, though certainly the Blu-ray disc devices can be expected to fall in price.

Nevertheless, with home servers becoming more and more economical, why would the entertainment industry dicker around with discs when in-home servers, on-demand cable movies and other service channels can ensure far more rapid delivery of content to interested audiences? Yes, it will provide in-store sales and help to introduce technophobes to yet another new media format, but isn't that a little bit like telling a blacksmith to keep on selling those horseshoes because you never know when those automobile people might get a hankering for using their old horse-drawn carriage again?

It seems as if the movie industry, like many other sectors in the content industry, is a captive of its traditional metrics. Faced with a new technology - HDTV - the movie producers said "Hey, now we can make more money on in-store disc sales - this is great." This of course locks them into a form of sales that's chasing yesterday's audiences: in an on-demand world of content, it's better to develop an on-demand system that can enable more people to respond to systems such as search engines and profile-matchers that can feed people the movies that would most interest them in the moment. If you can get a movie easily on an on-demand basis and it is priced to make it competitive with theatres, store sales and rentals at different points in its "shelf life" why would you focus so much energy on a format that will inevitably be the focus of piracy? In an economy in which our ability to enjoy libraries of old content stacked on a shelf is dubious at best, the rationale for disc sales has grown appreciably thinner.

Producers of all traditional media need to get far better at making their content discoverable and accessible in the venues that users value most. If I am on my mobile phone, make it easly for me to click on an icon or link when a movie is mentioned and queue it up for my viewing for the next five days. If I am reading a book review at a Starbucks, make it easy for me to go download it into my iPhone or to order a print-on-demand copy that I can pick up at Kinko's. Print magazine publishers floundered for years with getting their online models to work because they were unwilling to embrace similar basic questions of how to service their audiences. When Hollywood gets around to recognizing more clearly that they're in the audience serving business and not the film and disc distribution business hopefully they'll follow the lead of publishers who have already started to learn how to service their audiences the way that they like to be served. In the meantime that terabyte server looks like a tasty option to reclaim my bookshelves for...books? I don't know, now...

Labels: blu-ray, hdtv, media, video

Let's face it, for an enormous company Microsoft is not lining up many hits today. Its Vista operating system has had tepid reception at best, the EU has brought it to its knees on monopolistic practices, its Zune portable is praying for a second life this holiday season and the Xbox's shaky quality record makes a win for the new Halo 3 game a must to be kept in contention with competitive platforms. Ouch. But with oodles of cash and a well-focused online advertising strategy Microsoft is gearing up to exploit the gaps in Google's game plan that will give it a leg up in online content markets.

One of Google's key gaps to date has been social networking. While its Orkut platform has been successful in Brazil and certain other countries and rumblings of a greater social networking plan for Google grow larger, it's Facebook that's attracting both college-age folks and seasoned professionals who are willing to hang their hats up online on Facebook's increasingly robust social media platform. As noted by The New York Times and others, then, Microsoft's USD 240 million investment for a mere 1.6 percent of Facebook ownership is a significant win for Facebook and an opportunity for Microsoft to regain some sorely needed lost ground. The transaction scales Facebook's ultimate market value to a breathtaking but highly speculative USD 15 billion, making Rupert Murdoch's USD 583 million investment in MySpace seem like a bargain basement transaction in retrospect.

The New York Times article notes that the initial investment will secure Microsoft a platform for its ad network's growth, which is certainly a key component of making sure that it can leverage the highly valuable contexts available in social media. With the high level of personal endorsement and interaction available in Facebook Microsoft advertisers will be very pleased to find an alternative to search engine results and typical media outlets through which to build relationships with their markets. But the real underlying move by Microsoft is to have a dibs on Facebook's evolving social media-oriented computer operating system environment, a must-have for Microsoft in light of Google's evolving plans to have a Web-oriented OS of its own that will help drive its social media plans.

With more people than ever using the Web as their primary repository for both personal content and their own publishing endeavors Microsoft is at a dangerous juncture in its evolution, perhaps even more dangerous than when Netscape's browser began to threaten the supremacy of Microsoft's PC platform as a staging ground for content applications. Facebook has demonstrated with its rapidly growing array of embeddable applications that whole classes of content infrastructre that are at the heart of Microsoft's long-term cash flow may be rendered moot by social media environments such as Facebook's that enable people to build and share highly personalized portals with no or limited technical expertise. Applications such as its Business 3.0 module enable B2B communication that may provide a new way for businesses to develop 1-to-1 relationships via Facebook in ways that will make today's B2B advertising and supply chain management seem very ill targeted over time. All in all, Microsoft needs to get a revenue stream from social media badly - far moreso than either Google or Yahoo.

Will Facebook wind up being the dominant social media platform for both personal and business personal publishing? Once people set up shop in a social media environment there's a certain entropy that sets in which is likely to discourage any radical shifts: you want to keep your "peeps" around you as much as possible, and Facebook offers an increasingly compelling environment to enable open publishing and content integration. Most importantly unlike some other social media environments Facebook is designed for people's true identity as opposed to any number of avatars or pseudonyms that they may use in other social media environments. The emphaisis in Facebook is on knowing who you know, not gaming them for PR or other ulterior motives. This makes environments such as Facebook and LinkedIn that enable people to present their real selves the hottest marketing environments available in social media. By contrast, what's the value of selling to someone wearing green wings and fishnet stockings in Second Life? Good for a quick buck, but not relationship selling by any degree.

Realistically Facebook is by far the greater winner in this deal, having established an awesome figure for its market value and strong leverage for any other subsequent deals to help it gain market momentum. It's perhaps not as one-sided as the deal that Bill Gates cut with IBM to get rights to sell Mircosoft's PC operating systems on other platforms, but it's about equally clear who's behind the curve and who is able to help them get back in the game. And like that earlier deal this may be a sign that Microsoft is waning in its ability to influence electronic publishing effectively. But with an advertising strategy that is well-adapted to playing on multiple platforms to service multiple ad networks the Facebook deal is as good a shot a any that Microsoft is likely to have to use social media as a leverage point for future revenues. Don't expect miracles from either partner as a result of this alliance, but to expect their competitors to sweat it a little harder to get a foot in the door of compelling online communities.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, facebook, media, Microsoft, Social Media, Technology

The New York Times covers some of the recent surges in Silicon Valley startups getting massive amounts of funding and, in some instances, handsome rewards for private investors backing online content plays. RightMedia's acquisition by Yahoo for a cool USD 850 million and microscopic startup Ning's USD 214 million valuation on USD 44 million of private equity investment are just some of the highlights in today's parade of bets by investors who seem to have the pocketbooks of major media companies at their disposal on a regular basis.

It's easy to see why many are saying that the bubble fever of the dot-com era is beginning to surge again, and in some ways the bubble doubters have a lot of credible evidence that points to many more losers than winners in the push to come up with valuable contexts for content. First and foremost is the inventory problem: with social media helping to multiply the outlets available for advertising at a nearly Malthusian rate there is way too much available inventory for advertisers trying to tap into online audiences. Just as advertising was supposed to float every business plan in 2000 regardless of the available demand there's sure to be a shakeout as reality begins to catch up with the inventory issue. Also having a familiar feel is the availability of interesting but all-too-similar technology plays that have little chance at building audiences at a rate that could justify reasonable returns. How many it's-like-Facebook-with-Skype-and-who-knows-what-else ideas can the marketplace absorb? The pocketbooks of major media companies, the presumed exit points for most of these plays, are not going to support these types of tools endlessly.

But there are some major differences this time around that might help to make more of today's bubbles a little longer lasting:

• Contextual advertising. While there's an abundance of inventory generated in part by social media there is not an abundance of specific audiences for specific goods and services. The dot-com bubble burst largely before contextual advertising had begun to take off to enable a different kind of economics for the long tail of content that can benefit from high-margin goods and services that match up with niche interests. While contextual ads still place a lot of pressure on online publishers to come up with the goods that attract the best ads, their ability to service lucrative niche markets very cost-effectively will make the landing for many online publishers a little softer as the economy cools off.
  
• Finite mainstream media. Even as social media has expanded rapidly the ability of mainstream media companies to create inventory has not changed significantly over the past seven years. While content management, mining and other production tools have enabled publishers to develop more engaging content, with the exception of video there's not a lot more out there. In fact, with cutbacks, consolidations and increased competition from social media outlets one could say that there's less mainstream text inventory online than ever to absorb the advertising budgets of major corporations that crave their content. What has increased, though, are the syndication efforts of publishers to get their content out into new contexts via embedded content services such as Voxant, user feeds and via new mobile platform partners. The need for more usable inventory will keep demand for new content sources high - and multiples relatively lofty - until overall advertising demand softens.
• The creativity factor. While media companies on both the consumer and enterprise side of the content business are great at managing tightly defined content products they have proven time and again that the corporate cultures that thrive off of control-oriented values are very poor at coming up with new ideas for online content products that thrive on today's softer concepts of value created through collaboration and contextualization. Many so-so ideas will still come and go in Silicon Valley but as a whole the price that media companies are paying for failing to re-invent their own cultures to encourage more risk-taking with new ventures will be regular trips down Highway 101 to fill their needs for innovation with maturing venture-backed companies. You'd think that after seven years it would be different, but we're probably at least five years away from media companies having made enough of a transition into more innovative internal cultures to make those trips less frequent for those who survive the shift.
• The impending return of premium content. While advertising gains the spotlight in most business plans the push of services such as Near-Time to build profits from private communities of social media and the repositioning of print magazines as community-building tools are increasing the promise of online publishers to build new streams of revenue from relatively small amounts of content. People are also willing to paystill for events - and more content is likely to be positioned as premium event content online in ways that will complement ad-supported channels rather than conflict with them. Look for a broadening array of business models that include new premium elements that could soften the downturn of ad cycles.
  

Mind you there are just about as many technologists as there ever were with the ability to code and not a clue as to how to be real publishers who will keep the winds of blarney blowing up from the Bay as fresh as ever. Fools will come and fools will go, but as a whole the frontiers of online publishing are still raw enough to warrant independent investments along the scale of today's efforts for several years to come. Probably the biggest factor for determining how healthy that growth curve stays is the ability to get more people more access to electronic content. We're at the beginning of a growth gap in which mobile access to Web content is hobbled by poor network access and costly access plans while land-based access is stalling in U.S. markets.

At the same time high-speed access in overseas markets is exploding, creating more opportunities for new non-U.S. players to carve their own segments out of the global content pie very rapidly. The sooner that publishers can recognize that there's more to be gained globally by pushing more open online publishing models the more opportunities they will have to get their fair share of global online markets. With contextual content and advertising breaking down traditional boundaries for monetization publishers need to think more aggressively as to how to profit from content that knows no borders.

With so much of today's content under development being funded privately it's hard for any exit to the doorways to get a stampede effect going in the same way that IPO-oriented investments in the dot-com era got out of hand. But until mainstream investments begin to offer more attractive returns there is likely to be a steady stream of private investors willing to dabble a bit of their fortunes in potentially high-yield content plays that will put them in an even richer gravy train. As many of these people have already made at least one round of successful investments there's always the chance that smart money can follow smart money indefinitely. Then again, most of us are only as smart as our last good decision. Perhaps Mr. Darwin will be taking on Lord Malthus' math sooner than we think.

Labels: bubble, media, Social Media, Technology, Trends

AP reports on Terry Semel's stepping down from the CEO role at Yahoo after challenges to his leadership at a recent stockholders meeting made a swift move to restore investor confidence an imperative. The move is notable as much for what didn't happen as what did: Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang will be taking on the CEO role to re-establish both investor sentiment and Valley creds for the short term while Susan Decker, thought to have been Semel's hand-picked probable successor, notches up to President from overseeing ad operations. This may mean a wait-and-see period for Decker while the company as a whole adjusts to Semel's departure before moving up to the top role but more likely it's a move for Semel to have a proxy for his vision at Yang's disposal to ensure that his initiatives have some leadership to prove out his legacy.

Semel's media background was seen as a plus when he took over at Yahoo, promising "adult" leadership and the ability to lead Yahoo towards deals with mainstream content providers that would help to build up its portal in the eyes of online audiences. But a funny thing happened on the way to the earnings reports: search engine Google proved that being able to contextualize the world's content was more important than trying to build a bigger and better AOL. Yahoo has made some strong moves in recent months towards building up the power of user-generated content to drive Yahoo traffic, but the key revenue driver - contextual ad performance - continues to lag.

What are the prospects for Yahoo in the wake of Semel's reign? All in all, pretty good. While Yahoo has suffered from focusing too intently on traditional media products in the past, its push towards stronger social media offerings and innovative reuse of these assets for new portlets for consumer goods and hot topics offers Yahoo a role as a lead innovator amongst traditional media companies. With Semel out of the picture it's likely that staff trimmings will cut through some loyalty factors and allow Yahoo to gain some momentum in deal-making to shore up its innovation position and market share. Yahoo is building high-quality content that appeals to mainstream Web users, effectively bridging the gap between AOL-like neophytes and seasoned users with highly focused interests with an array of well-designed content products.

But the key problem remains that Yahoo has mapped out a strategy that weds it largely to the goal of most traditional media companies: build market share and viewership for a destination portal. While its ad network will help Yahoo to expand past that footprint effectively, their dedication to making it work for brand advertisers is likely to make it too focused on the declining footprints of traditional media companies to build market share quickly enough to be fully competitive with Google's ad campaigns. As pointed out by TechCrunch recently the "long tail" of content is getting only thicker, placing a premium on products that can absorb and interpret its content for highly focused audiences. This will continue to play to Google's advantage as it builds both revenues and margin from an abundance of less-expensive content sources that can be monetized through its contextual ad technologies and dominant search engine.

Yahoo has also neglected its enterprise strategy for many years, effectively ceding this arena to Google and a host of other services that are effective in contextualizing both enterprise and Web-sourced content. With "prosumers" dominating online markets increasingly Yahoo has little to offer professionals online beyond its dominant financial portal. Google's enterprise efforts may be also-ran in comparison to efforts by IBM, FAST and Autonomy, but increasingly it's an also-ran that just happens to have at least some footprint everywhere. On the publisher's side of the equation are subscription database services struggling to hold on to revenue and margins through more sophisticated content integration services - not likely candidates for partnership via Yahoo's highly consumer-oriented efforts.

New management can help Yahoo to take advantage of its considerable media assets but it's going to have to be a team that's willing to make some tough decisions regarding its traditional media partners fairly quickly. As more of these partners take a multi-channel strategy for content distribution the advantages of paying hefty percentages for the use of their content only props up the potential revenue streams of Yahoo competitors who go to play with mainstream media players. Yahoo must dance delicately as it works to continue its strong relationships with existing media companies while managing to be much more stingy in its licensing negotiations, so as to free up more capital for deals and product investment.

What will be Semel's ultimate legacy? I think that it's easy to lose sight of how disjointed Yahoo was when Semel took over. While balkanization still plagues some Yahoo operations overall he helped to forge what it arguably a well-run company that has created a dominant position in many forms of destination media. The ad game was already moving out of Yahoo's grasp when he came on, so while he can't be credited for a triumphant reversal he laid the groundwork for a good product strategy. The largest spot on Semel's record will be the loss of major deals for online video. With Google Video emerging as a leading search engine for video content across the Web and YouTube firming up as the leading source of user-generated online video it can be argued that Semel's media roots failed to prepare him for the most rapid shifts in online entertainment in the past ten years. But this blind spot was hardly unique amongst major media companies.

We'll see how rapidly Yahoo repositions its considerable assets in the months ahead, but my guess today is that Yahoo will emerge a year from a now a far leaner operation more focused on user-generated content and on making content from all sources more usable. Mainstream media and brand advertising will still be a very important part of Yahoo's revenue mix but we're likely to see Yahoo acting more as a better bridge for media companies to Google-like strategies that lead mainstream media content away from the confines of fixed portals. Better widgets, better feeds, better toolkits for developing branded portlets, better user-enabled aggregation tools - there are a lot of ways to make Yahoo content grow beyond its current destination footprint. That is, if Yahoo is willing to challenge traditional media companies more aggressively to move beyond their roots.

Labels: media, Trends, Yahoo

You've got to hand it to Time Inc.'s Chairman and CEO Ann Moore: she's a brave soldier who puts out a strong story. Echoing her presentation from the SIIA Information Industry Summit at a recent MPA breakfast (Ad Age coverage) Ann Moore quipped "You know, everybody stay calm," she suggested. "This is a great business we're in." Cheerleading aside there's only moderate cheer for Time's core print brands, in spite of a successful reclaiming of their management from AOL. Online revenues for Time properties are expected to represent about 18 percent of Time's 2007 revenues according to Moore; that's only about par with other comparable print brands these days - it's not exceptional. But Moore has provided strong brand management skills that have allowed Time.com to hold its own in a tough market for online general news content and that have propelled People.com from an online also-ran to a far more competitive position. It could have been a bloodbath given Time's slow transition into online delivery but it's turned out pretty well overall. "If you're going to spin me off, you better get a good price," she said.

Good may be good enough in today's market for deals driven by private equity: the spreadsheets will hold up long enough to justify a decent sale for a few months at least. But after that, all bets are off for print-dependent properties. With a likely recession looming freely available online content is going to make it easier for consumers to make budget decisions against print subscription products. Add in and recently raised postal rates putting the squeeze on magazine margins and all but the most efficient print distributors are going to be feeling major additional pain in the next six to twelve months. But even with these gloomy clouds on the horizon Moore does have some justification in feeling bullish about Time's potential. With a broad base of mass market publications Time has the potential to become a leader in mass-customized print delivery - allowing consumers to cherry-pick the types of articles that they'd like to see in print from Time's family of publications. As important as brand management can be in this era of look-alike online and print publications a rethinking of the ability of print to aggregate brands may be the ultimate salvation of execs with portfolios like Time Inc. For the rest there's always private equity - or perhaps Google Magazines.

Labels: Ann Moore, media, Time Inc., Trends

The Wall Street Journal reports on NewsCorp CEO Rupert Murdoch's attempts to have conversations with the Bancroft family and other majority shareholders of Dow Jones - efforts that seem to have been spurned so far in spite of promises of editorial independence and limited control over hiring and firing. The article cites a Bancroft family member who saw Murdoch's offer as "the usual stuff" (one wonders what other "usual stuff" has been offered to Dow Jones in recent months). It's understandable that a company with the heritage of Dow Jones would balk at an offer that looks more like a hunt for a trophy wife on the surface than a well-planned merger, but in the details of Murdoch's offer is plenty of evidence that there may be some strong vision at work here.

Specifically of interest is Murdoch's willingness to invest in political and global economic coverage that would make The Wall Street Journal a more attractive international journal of record for business-minded people. In an increasingly global economy Murdoch sees no doubt in Dow Jones the core of an editorial and production team that has the ability to muscle into a more pronounced global leadership role in business media through localized print and online content. WSJ's readership is broad but not broad enough to allow Dow Jones to invest in a major global push effectively. It would be hard to imagine someone other than Murdoch who would have the cash, the influence and the market presence that would allow Dow Jones' brands to thrive in international markets to the extent that his tutelage would allow.

It's understandable that a proudly American brand like Dow Jones would resist Murdoch's advances but the sad fact of the matter is that U.S.-based business media services aimed at mass markets are not going to thrive in the years ahead unless they're more effective on a global scale. U.S. markets for business information are becoming far more data-intensive than overseas markets thanks to both the U.S. regulatory environment and the automated trading capabilities fed by that data. The in-depth journalism that is the specialty of Dow Jones will be focused more effectively on more opaque markets where insights beyond the reach of fair disclosure are needed more urgently. Other offers that are beyond this "usual stuff" may come along at some point but one wonders whether Dow Jones will have the market leverage at such an undetermined point in time to leverage its brand's strength as effectively as it can today. They may not like the suitor but Murdoch is leading with a strong suit that should be considered with a hard-nosed look at the spreadsheets as well as with a journalist's gut.

Labels: Business Information, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Dow Jones, media, News Corp, Trends

The EconSM event is living up expectations for a great networking environment, including bumping into a new company called Edgeio, which provides classified ad systems on a white label basis for publishers of all kinds. The concept behind Edgeio is fairly simple but compelling: use their technology to build up easy-to-track classified ads from individuals and get them placed contextually in appropriate content. You can use just the technology to build your own ad service or syndicate in content from publishing partners using Edgeio. The publishers are in complete control of how ads are priced (or not) with Edgeio taking a percentage of revenues, typically 20 percent. This has good use for publishers in general, but it appears to be especially well positioned for social media, especially Wiki-based microcommunities. As communities grow they can spawn of new microcommunities that can use Edgeio to exchange ads with the parent community and to draw in other highly related communities. There's a lot of talk about scalability in online advertising and marketing at EconSM today but not much talk yet about how classifieds are the perfect one-to-one marketing medium for social media. Expect tools like this to thrive for highly targeted social media content - and to form the base for tools that help higher-powered marketers to reach customers on a one-to-one basis.

Labels: advertising, business models, econSM, media, Social Media, Technology, Trends

Conde Nast is nothing if not a contrarian publisher at times, so it's not out character for them to be launching Portfolio, a new business magazine that is loaded with business advertisers new to Conde Nast publications, according to The New York Times. Portfolio covers serious business issues but it does so with a focus and style reminiscent of the chatty and sometimes catty fashion and lifestyle publications for which it is best known. While Portfolio may seem a fish out of water to more traditional news publications it's actually a very clever play at an interesting time. Print appeals very well to those on the very high end of the economic scale, a fashion statement of sorts that speaks to the exclusive circles in which major executives find themselves. Why fritter with Twitter when you can relax on your G6 business jet with a copy of Portfolio next to your spouse's copy of Architectural Digest? It's an out-Forbes-ing of of Forbes' already elite outlook and a direct poke in the eye to McGraw-Hill's increasingly online-oriented BusinessWeek property.

At the same time, though, there's quite a bit to be said for the Portfolio portal as well. Yes, it's not armed with in-depth data and other tools found typically on business information Web sites but it does have absolutely top-notch graphics and layout and a five-story top news summary that cuts to the chase with very brief summaries that accompany more in-depth features. Features include profiles of key executives, a roundup of clubhouse figures one is likely to encounter in the most elite social circles. It's not clear that many of Portfolio's print subscribers are likely to spend much time at the publication's online site but if they do they should feel comfortable browsing through its generously spaced and well-designed pages. There aren't many publishers who can deliver business information as a lifestyle publication of this sort and once there's one publication of this kind there aren't likely to be substitute products that will elbow their way into such a rarefied niche. Kudos to Conde Nast for recognizing an opportunity that plays to its strengths - for now.

Labels: Conde Nast, media, Portfolio

Two major conferences focusing on business information services point towards two very different approaches to creating revenues and profits from today's enterprise and media markets. Yet both database publishers and media companies are circling around many of the same opportunities to develop value for business information markets. The battle for the future of business information has just begun in earnest, with no clear winners in sight but with many "old guard" attitudes from both camps in dire need of ejection from the scene.

Click here to read the full News Analysis

Labels: Business Information, enterprise, Factiva, LexisNexis, media, News Analysis

From the wilds of Scottsdale, Arizona back to the right coast via the redeye brings me to ABM's Digital Velocity event, drawing more than 230 people to learn the best practices for accelerating digital revenue growth in B2B media. The room is totally packed. Full disclosure: Shore is a member of the ABM Digital Media Council, so I have my bias as to the quality of this program, having served on the program planning committee. I think that the committee worked very hard to put together a very meaty event, and the level of attendance seems to reflect its anticipated value. I am not going to live-blog every panel, but I will be posting through the event in our events weblog and posting links here.

Keynote - Dr. Jim Taylor, Harrison Group
Organize for Tomorrow's Success
Empower your Workforce for the New Digital Landscape
Lunch Break with the Vendors
Venture Capital and the New Valuation Paradigms
Editorial/Content Strategies in a User-Generated World
Implementing a Web Content Management System
The Business of Working with IT
Best Practices to Web-Based Media Kits
Critical Role of Audience Development
The New Metrics That Run Your Business
Buying and Selling in the Digital World

Labels: ABM, Business Information, Digital Velocity, events, media, Social Media