The registration desk at Gotham Hall was awash with tags at this year's well-attended SIIA Information Industry Summit in New York City, with many familiar names from today's leading content companies in attendance and a strong smattering of newcomers to SIIA Content Division events. The newcomers were not for the most part young bucks trying to make their mark on increasingly free-flowing funding for content ventures, but moreso companies that are learning their lessons a quarter at a time in a marketplace for content that favors profits and metrics over hype and vision. Investors were present in abundance at the conference, but they now tend to focus on making operating companies that will be fully capable corporate entities long before the acronym "IPO" is even considered.

We heard a lot of talk about a "tipping point" during the dot-com boom, a point in time when the content industry would move past "getting it" and move on to the business models that had promised to transform the landscape of publishing. Judging by the rather sour reception that the opening keynote from journalist and author Michael Wolff received, either there never was a tipping point or we passed one in 2004 and were too busy dealing with it to realize it. Overall I am voting for the latter. With online ad spending rising healthily in both gross monies and as a percentage of overall ad spends and with professionally oriented content increasingly enriched and valued by their own audiences, the electronic content business is going along handsomely, thanks very much.

Michael's soliloquy was entertaining but it painted a world in which "nobody believes [publishers] have information anymore," a world in which corporate content brands are being replaced by personal content brands via weblogs and other outlets, thus changing the content conversation fundamentally. Great stuff to talk about on a private jet or at a SoHo watering hole, and perhaps ultimately true, but it misses the point. As exemplified by today's conference panels there is a thriving content industry that is working its butt off to make money using the new realities of online publishing, an industry which recognizes that new sources of valued content are changing the equation of publishing forever but positioning themselves for success in it. It's hard work, detail-oriented work that differs radically from many of the careless and carefree binges of the '90s. Even today's webloggers, the stars of much media attention, are mostly hard-working content enthusiasts living simple lives with limited financial upside. In other words, Michael's mad because we're not pouting about having to work for a living. The ironic flipside of the "democratization of content" that media pundits herald is that we don't need to listen to them any more: individuals and institutions can build their own content channels to get the straight story. Good content will always create its own strong brand, but there's no resting on your brand's goodwill for more than a breath or two. Working hard to maintain and grow content brands online using lessons both old and new is the real tipping point at hand: survivors are now starting to thrive again because they were willing to forget about that point as a real measure of progress and could keep focused on profits and margins instead.

The brand issue was highlighted by an attendee who pointed out in the keynote Q&A that the Times of India is buying consumer products companies, in effect guaranteeing itself a share of their ad dollars no matter what. Kind of a Wal-Mart approach to ad-supported content: keep your suppliers' brands in the spotlight but get them to knuckle down to provide you adequate margins. This is nothing new to major title aggregators in the content business, but being able to manage content brands is getting only trickier as the value of those brands moves closer to the user. While publishers focused on content product brands get back to reasonable single-digit growth, Google today reported (WSJ - subscription) a doubling of profits based largely on ad dollar growth. That's money that Google will spend reasonably quickly on development, as opposed to companies like MarketWatch that sat on sizable cash reserves to the point where they couldn't spend on R&D without upsetting the stock holders (solution: get acquired by Dow Jones). The biggest tipping point the content industry is facing is the inexorable shift of content value to technology companies such as Google that are draining off visionary development investment by the content companies themselves. As search engines both public and institutional become the "Wal-Marts" of content, publishers will find increasing pressure to build brands that can thrive in this new environment or do much better with brands that thrive in profitable niche industries that don't scale well to mega-aggregators such as Google. Both are achievable, but neither guarantees the long-term survival of these brands. That's something that will take an enormous amount of investment - the kind that Google, Yahoo! and others can do easily now. The tipping point may not have been any particular point in revenue history as much as the point at which your competition will never allow you to thrive - just survive. Major publishers are betting against this equation, but we'll see how they stack up against competition that was born at the tipping point.