I've been making the rounds lately amongst many of the major enterprise publishers, and while there are some bright spots here and there in their outlook and aggressiveness in challenging markets, I am afraid that the challenges to their earnings in a tough economy are taking their toll on many of them. The good news is that aggressive cost-cutting has been able to hold up earnings at many enterprise publishers, including the recent earnings report by Thomson Reuters indicating that profits have doubled in the wake of their cost-cutting after the acquisition of Reuters. But at Thomson Reuters and many other enterprise publishers, including Reed Elsevier, the top line of revenue growth continues to look challenging for the next year or so at minimum. Traditional forms of enterprise investment in subscription information services are down, while investments in new and innovative approaches to information services are being metered out judiciously by major vendors in the midst of continuing cost control pressures.

Labels: content technology, earnings, enterprise, market research, narrative research, Publishing, revenues

A fundamental problem that the publishing industry faces in getting revenues from online content is that most of the value that can be created from their content lies beyond their own Web sites and portals. With billions of Web publications vying to get people's attention and a relative handful of professionally produced publications to compete for that attention it's no small wonder many media executives are humming the now-familiar "content in context" meme as they ponder how to make use of the Web's ocean of content to promote their own wares. The sad truth, though, is that most publishers are ill-equipped to get any money from their content beyond their own online publications. Most media organizations have tiny content licensing business development teams that typically trudge through protracted deals with a handful of publishing partners, leaving the lion's share of potential revenues from partners on the table.

Attributor Corporation has been hot on the trail of how to close the gap between potential revenues from content used across the Web and and the ability to extract those revenues. The Attributor system works by listening to feeds of content from participating publishers. Attributor captures what they've published and then compares it to content that's been published on the Web. When Attributor finds content that's a full or partial match it compiles content usage reports for clients who can then can use automated tools from Attributor or their own methods to pursue the reuse of their content from a business and legal perspective.

How big is the opportunity for monetizing reused content? Recently Attributor shared with me some research based on content from prominent publishers' Web sites fed into its system along with Compete.com usage data that surfaced some profound statistics. The key thought-provoker emerging from this research is that the audience for people viewing content on sites that were not active syndication or licensing partners was more than five times larger than the audience on the publishers' own sites. Almost half of these largely "passive syndicators" were copying 90 percent or more of the content from publishers' articles and more than 70 percent of the copied articles were using at least half of the available content from articles. Before the publishers reading this post slip on their hair shirts and moan in protest, please consider this first: what publisher wouldn't want to have a 5X increase in potentially monetizable content inventory with no additional overhead?

The research also indicated that two-thirds of the sites using content from these leading publishers were providing links back to the publisher's sites, indicating that they were at least nominally cooperative in building traffic to their sites. Armed with data from Attributor, publishers can pursue on a more highly automated basis Web sites that use their content and turn passive syndicators into active publishing partners - and in the process of doing so shift the balance of traffic back into sites that will feed revenues to the publisher. Attributor projects that using their technologies could help to reduce non-cooperative passive syndicators significantly, potentially doubling traffic captured at publishers' own sites and nearly tripling the traffic visiting cooperative syndication partners. No doubt it would also help content reusers pressing the boundaries of fair use policy to understand what individual publishers considered to be fair use more quickly and effectively.

Attributor sees its data gathering and analysis tools as a key to unlocking significant new online revenues for publishers. It sees at least two basic options that publishers using its data can undertake to establish revenue streams rapidly. Option one: Attributor helps publishers reclaim their fair share of ad revenues from ads served up by existing ad networks on sites using their content. This could in theory help for managing both active and passive syndication partners. Option two: enable Attributor to funnel ads from existing networks and publishers' own direct ad sales to syndication partners. Obviously there are other steps that publishers could take based on Attributor data, but either of these options suggested by Attributor help both to reclaim ad revenues for legitimate publishers and syndicators efficiently and to reduce the revenues fed out by ad networks to non-legitimate syndicators.

To make it easier for publishers large and small to get an idea of the potential for Attributor to help them monetize content they have launched FairShare, a no-fee service that enables people to get data on sites using their content from Attributor analytics provided in an RSS feed. FairShare will pump out stats on individual articles and how they've been reused on specific Web sites, including data on what percentage of an article has been used, whether the reuser is using ads on the page on which it appears and whethe there are linkbacks to their original content. As an option FairShare makes it easier for people using Creative Commons licensing to map their license terms to the patterns of use found in Attributor's Web site analysis. Although launched just a few days ago FairShare is already tracking more than 150,000 articles and has found more than 3.3 million shared copies of content. As seen in the example to the right, FairShare is finding sites that use just fair use snippets of ContentBlogger's content as well as sites that seem to take more than their fair share. If ContentBlogger were ad-supported and Attributor were funneling this data to the ad networks that support content clippers I could be seeing some automatic revenues from these sites. A nice thought in a slow ad economy, no?

Attributor technology has been launched recently as an underpinning for FreeWheel, a service that enables videos from YouTube and other outlets that are embedded on other Web sites to be served up with the ads that benefit the original video publisher the most. FreeWheel calls this concept "Monetization Rights Management," as opposed to the Digital Rights Management packaging that tries to keep others from distributing content themselves. FreeWheel notes - quite rightly, I believe - that legitimate viral distribution of content needs to be encouraged so that content can find its most valuable contexts. Once content is in a valuable context it can be monetized with ads and other marketing mechanisms that benefit both the creator of the content and the publisher that found a valuable context for their content.

As major publishers mull over the capabilities of Attributor technologies, hopefully they begin to see that it offers a key solution to the dilemmas of how to make money on content in an era in which controlling distribution is not only less feasible but also less desirable. To borrow from the language of my book Content Nation, the world is now a nation of publishers, a nation whose value cannot be ignored by traditional publishers as a source of monetizable contexts. Since most non-subscription Web content relies on search engines to maximize their ad revenues, Attributor's search-based technologies can enable publishers to understand who's using their content with the same tools that those publishers use to drive monetizable traffic to their sites. Using Attributor data and tools can enable a highly automated and efficient approach to revenue generation from viral distribution that would eliminate friction with those outlets that use a publisher's content fairly and that can allow publishers to keep on top of "bad apples" on a daily basis.

As major publishers such as The New York Times and The Guardian begin to set their content loose via sophisticated programming interfaces the Attributor concepts of using searching and content identification to establish commercial relationships automatically with publishers using their content can open up an era in which reused content is creating higher value and revenues rapidly for publishers with lower audience acquisition costs. With revenue acquistion schemes such as Attributor in place publishers can concentrate more on making their content as useful and as accurate as possible - and leave the inventiveness of where it's going to be most useful to the world at large.

Certainly publishers will continue to compete to make their own publications a destination of choice, but with only thousands of traditional publishers and billions of self-empowered Web and mobile publishers the time has come to use technology to harvest the value of content in as many publishing contexts as posssible as efficiently as possible. Most especially in the news industry, where getting people's attention in fleeting moments is increasingly difficult, the ability to harvest revenues from content reuse and linking more automatically is an absolute necessity.

This need to chase the contexts of content use in order to make money in online media does not mean that copyright is a dead concept. Far from it: copyright ensures that the creators of original works of authorship have the ability to claim ownership of the intellectual property that is rightfully theirs, especially when it is used in contexts where its use is harder to verify, such as in enterprises and in private communications such as emails, photocopying and reprints. But it's important to remember that the concepts of copyright were introduced into law when publishing was still a relatively fledgling industry, with few commercial outlets available and with the need to support getting information and ideas out to the public via a still-young technology a crying necessity. The "printing press" of today is not any particular Web site or service but the Web as a whole: every person has the potential to play a role in the mechanism of publishing. As such, copy rights, while still relevant, have become less important than context rights - the ability to say how participants in a global peer publishing and aggregation process should recognize the value of a creative work. Nearly three years ago I introduced this concept at a presentation at BookExpo in Washington, DC, using the above square logo as a symbol for context rights.

Today in the work of Attributor we see the beginnings of the effective monetization of context rights taking form. I am hopeful that publishers will finally begin to see the outlines of how to use technologies such as Attributor to forge more effective relationships with the global publishing mechanism of Content Nation to benefit the creative forces behind their content and to create new ways to define the value of their brands. It's a far different methodology than most publishers are used to, but in a world in which the fundamental nature of publishing has changed far more radically than most traditional publishers have dared to acknowledge, it is time for publishers to embrace context rights and to define their value propositions more effectively in a world whose very survival may depend upon the power of ubiquitous publishing to solve problems facing humanity rapidly.

(Full disclosure statement: I really have nothing to disclose, I have had no past or present commercial relationship with Attributor. I just believe that they are pursuing one of the most effective routes to content monetization available today and I hope that publishers pay close attention to their efforts.)

Labels: Attributor, Attributor Corporation, Creative Commons, Digital Rights Management, FairShare, media, Monetization, Money, Publishing, revenues, RSS, YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will social media grow to be a $4.3 billion dollar industry on just ads alone? We examine the role of premium content in social media growth. Also, some thoughts on Open Access as a growing trend for scholarly research and bridging the gap between peer-reviewed publications and Nature's Precedings portal.

Labels: Nature, Near-Time, precedings, revenues, shoreviews, Social Media, video