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An inside look at the world of electronic content resources acquired and managed by information professionals covering its content, emerging technology such as eBooks and commercial models.
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ContentBloggerTM - eResources Marketplace |
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| Friday, May 21, 2004 |
SIIA Content Forum: Intersection of Search, Content and Premium Sources
The 2004 Content Forum began over a pleasant lunch at the San Francisco Palace Hotel, with a lively discussion moderated by Jeff Cutler, VP of SIIA Content division, between representatives of Yahoo, Highbeam, and Northern Light, companies of considerably less vintage than this grand old hotel in the city center. David Seuss, CEO of the revitalized Northern Light, places a high value on the editorial aspects in providing a search service aggregating sources which meet business needs, including internal sources, free websources and proprietary content for which the organization has rights. The NL focus is targeted slices of content, which is more valuable for their customers than the general search engine approach.
In contrast, Patrick Spain, CEO of HighBeam, targets individual business customers, at a $99.95 price point,which can be easily expensed. As a customer, there is no differentiation between free and premium sources in the subscription price, so the buy decision doesn't intrude on search. Furthermore, this approach does not differentiate between the customer behavior as a consumer vs. an employee.
David Mandelbrot, V.P. of Search Content at Yahoo, Inc. faces different challenges as a major player in the search engine market. With 800 searches per second, and 2.1 billion searches per month, the user scale is dramatic, but finding answers is frequently difficult. Yahoo, along with Google, is attempting to integrate premium sources into search results to improve answers, but this requires a billing infrastructure and differentiating premium vs. free in search results, neither of which are easy, particularly on this scale. With 140 million registered users and paid content areas already in place, Yahoo has a head start on Google in this area. And so the search engine war continues in Sunnyvale, CA!
A striking aspect of this discussion was that all three depend on traditional aggregators, such as Proquest and Gale, to deliver content as the middleman, rather than dealing with the idiosyncrasies of thousands of individual publishers. The challenge is to establish the business models and the market: Northern Light with organizations with established information managers, HighBeam with the individual business/consumer and Yahoo with a new style of pay per view embedded with free content. Stay tuned!
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posted by Jean Bedord at
9:27 PM |
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SIIA Content Forum: Leveraging the Content Value Chain
Starting out the second day of the conference, this panel was ably moderated by Ken Kirkley, of Proquest Information & Learning, and represented the full spectrum of the content value chain. The underlying theme was the difficulty of sorting out the thorny contract, license and copyright issues that plague the content chain to the end user, who may or may not be a paying customer. Richard Geiger of the San Francisco Chronicle articulated the dilemma of a content creator, whose content is free on SFGate.com, but premium in other channels. Jeff Davis of CBS MarketWatch faces the issue of integrating and managing licenses from acquired companies Inlumen and Pinnacor (formerly Screaming Media)--requiring several full time inhouse lawyers! Cory Johnson of RSiCopyright described the latest of copyright compliance offerings, which integrates into the web browser.
The most intriguing discussion centered around the partnership between Factiva, represented by Alan Scott, and IBM WebFountain, represented by Bob Carlson. The basic premise is that corporations can no longer ignore what is happening outside their walls, and that WebFountain provides an analytical framework to look at trends and patterns, in both the open web and premium content. One application is Reputation Management--one company found their shampoo was being recommended for degreasing driveways, valuable information for managing their image.
Rights for data mining are murky, yet potentially lucrative. Factiva allows this type of data mining only with payment of additional fees which are then shared with publishers. But pricing the value of negative results and trends is not obvious, since the actual articles are not read. The general consensus of the attendees was that the legal framework needs to be rearranged to make compliance with rights terms and conditions easy to understand, otherwise, they will be ignored, particularly in the consumer space. Look for significant evolution in this area, as publishers and software developers struggle with redefinition...
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posted by Jean Bedord at
8:22 PM |
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SIIA Content Forum: Tools and Technology
Barry Bealer of Really Strategies, Inc. moderated an intriguing panel representing both content and technology. On the technology side, Bennett Zuker of Tacoda Systems described their new audience management approach to profile users, identifying those of high value to advertisers and to publishers. Using this behavioral targeting technology, ads are then delivered to these users in multiple contexts, i.e. Snapple ads were delivered to women identified as interested in health and fitness as they went from channel to channel. The technology is intriguing, with initial better results than contextual advertising, demonstrating yet another evolution of advertising on the web. Chris Scudder, CEO of ECNext, described successes in the online pay-per-view arena, with market research reports, targeting department level content buyers using credit cards, in sharp contrast to other commentary at the conference on the viability of PPV.
Technology by itself tends to be theoretical, so the content providers on the panel provided the reality of integrating technology and people to profit from content. Ken Doctor, of Knight-Ridder Digital, graphically described his challenges in getting electronic copy from curmudgeonly copy editors and overextended librarians at 30 Knight-Ridder newspapers, so his group could deliver a consistently formatted newsfeed by 6 AM every day. Keith White of Congressional Quarterly shifted to PDF delivery to reduce print costs, but found it saved their business after 9/11, when paper was not deliverable to their subscribers, forcing a shift to even more electronic delivery, using Sealed Media as the DRM technology. CQ experiments with incremental technology, including RSS for their free email newsletter, the most effective means for selling their high priced subscriptions.
The takeaway from this session was the value of incremental changes in work flow, utilizing technology, then carefuly monitoring customer response, evolutionary responses rather than revolutionary!
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posted by Jean Bedord at
7:31 PM |
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SIIA Content Forum: Getting the Deal Done
Aggregators, both traditional and new, were featured at this season, ably moderated by Paul Gerbino, Thomas Product News Network, who likens content to the maze of wires behind his computer. Skip Prichard, of Proquest information and Learning, described a very traditional aggregation business, with heavy academic roots, but seeking new distribution via course packs and vertical partners, and exploring limited advertising possibilities. Dawn Conway, VP of Content & Business at Lexis-Nexis, focused on delivering value to users, and suggesting flipping the current search model to better meet user information needs. The consultative sell is critical to their enterprise market, as they deal with IT professionals and purchasing agents. The Lexis-Nexis brand is not established with these constituencies as it is with legal professionals and librarians.
The new aggregators represented the individual buyer market, easier to penetrate than the complex sell in the enterprise market. Doug Herrington, co-founder of KeepMedia, is using both an online approach to sell magazine articles for a subscription of $4.95 a month, as well as promoting print subscriptions and utilizing advertising, thus attempting to monetize as many channels as possible. Other companies have tried this approach with limited success, so the open question is whether the environment has changed sufficiently, so this flavor will be successful.
Greg Reinacker, President of NewsGater Technologies, is the software voice of aggregation, providng a tool to allow the individual to choose RSS newsfeeds to read, either in their business life or their consumer life, essentially a self-aggregating model, which can include blogs, not otherwise readily accessible. RSS feeds are poliferating on the web, but have yet to be fully embraced by this group of attendees. Thomas Product News Network is quite successful in selling using RSS feeds for their industrial products, indicating growing acceptance. And in fair disclosure, Shore Communications also offers an RSS feed of their weekly newsletter, Shorelines. My expectation is that the majority of ezine publishers will offer RSS feeds by 2005, bypassing at least some of the email muck and mire!
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posted by Jean Bedord at
6:33 PM |
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SIIA Content Forum: Where is the Industry Headed?
The final panel moderating by Ed Keating of Easton Consultants elicited the most intriguing discussion. Michelle Horwitz of PR Newswire represented a traditional business being adapted to the web world, and the development of new products which can effectively monitor non-traditional publishing. Plaxo was cited as the poster child for a company which was ignorant of negative comments in blogs, and found these filled the first 3 pages of Google results, negating positive marketing efforts. David Myers of Ovid Technologies described moving into new technologies, integrating medical information with Office 2003 and patient records, challenging areas which require both credibility and new rights.
Rafat Ali, the editor/publisher of paidContent.org has become a "must read" ezine for this industry, and spoke as an evangelist for blogs and RSS. Christine Mason, CEO of Open Road Technologies described artificial intelligence embedded in their Watson product, a desktop search environments embedded in applications such as MS Office, Acrobat and Internet Explorer, a sort of "Google local". This becomes the users personal portal, a self-aggregating model, and an extension beyond the self-aggregation provided by RSS newsreaders. This has the potential to become the killer app for search and capable of trumping the integration of traditional aggregators into Microsoft Office 2003. The open web, with blogs and listservs, represents valued content, vcontent, to both users and their companies, and increasingly a factor in making money!
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posted by Jean Bedord at
1:57 PM |
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| Tuesday, May 04, 2004 |
Buying Electronic Journals is Challenging
Libraries, particularly corporate libraries, are moving toward subscribing to journals in electronic formats. I attended the recent SLA Pharmaceutical and Health Technology spring meeting, and discovered firsthand the frustration of actually implementing this vision of the virtual library. In the print world, most libraries deal with two subscription agencies, EBSCO and Swets. Professionals choose the titles and subscribe. The biggest headaches are subscription start and end dates, and claiming missing issues.
In the electronic world, these headaches remain the same, but there are even more complexities. First of all pricing--typically, there is a premium for electronic delivery, and these models are not standard across publishers. Secondly, access may be either by password or by ip address, and then there is the issue of who controls the access--the subscription agent or the publishers. Thirdly, there are licenses for electronic content which govern use by the institution. These licenses have to be reviewed by lawyers, both at the institution and the publisher. In contrast, print doesn't involve licenses, since the use is generally understood, and copyright is fairly generic.
How bad is this situation? One librarian who subscribes to 80 journals, which is small library, has to deal with 37 publishers on these issues. The subscription agencies can handle managing the money, but the publishers create individual barriers. Large libraries will have thousands of journals to manage, and managing them can easily require a full FTE, at a time when budgets are lean. Months involved in resolving the legal issues (typically state of jurisdiction for disputes) means sales can't be closed for publishers, and access for patrons can be delayed. Publishers, it seems, are their own worst enemy, at a time when increased sales would be welcome.
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posted by Jean Bedord at
3:16 PM |
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