The crowd was still buzzing from Michael Wolff's keynote by the time the panel on alternative business models convened. Moderator Patricia Sabosik, VP and General Manager of Thomson Learning Labs, had no sooner framed the topic than Gordon Crovitz, President of Electronic Publishing at Dow Jones, raised a reply to Wolff's sharp critique of the Wall Street Journal as a brand that had lost resonance from its peak in the 1990's. Like a champion prize fighter stunned by an upstart in the first round, Crovitz dismissed Wolff's analysis as "very amusing if very wrong" and then launched a disciplined detailing of WSJ's online successes - most notably that online revenues are likely to be up 30 percent this year and heading towards a probable fifth of overall ad revenues for the WSJ family by 2006. Crovitz sees that "branded content is more valuable than ever before," enhanced by effective contextualization to provide value to both readers and advertisers in search of targeted audiences using content in that context. But audience reach is still critical to advertisers, so the recent Dow Jones acquisition of MarketWatch provided a significant addition of online eyeballs to provide a more compelling package. If all of this sounds pretty non-alternative to you from a business model perspective I'd be hard-pressed to disagree. Even though as Crovitz notes "You can change a business model for a week," as WSJ Online did recently with its "open house" free trial, there's nothing new about free trials except perhaps one's ability to learn about their effect more easily online via Web statistic analysis. Going subscription-only for access to online premium content was a great "alternative" business model when WSJ Online made its debut several years ago and is still a brave and largely successful experiment, but the price of keeping out the riff-raff via subscription may be trumped eventually by the price of not getting your content out to where premium users are looking for it.

Mitch Rouda, President of Hanley Wood e-Media, feels that "there's nothing alternative about what we do," but that may say more about how advanced the state of the art in business publishing has become than their properties. Their stable of online portals such as ebuild aimed at the professional construction marketplace incorporate a powerful, search-oriented combination of editorial content, company profiles and product profiles. Yes, it's built mostly by "data humpers" filling in SKU-level content in their database and the models of revenue are traditional, but it's somewhat amazing how many business-oriented publishers have transformed their products in terms of the content within those traditional payment models. But the threats are still evident: though Mitch challenged people to compare their capabilities to a Google search on "weather stripping", the actual results are pretty darn robust, with several effectively targeted contextual ads to boot - and pretty good ecommerce results on Froogle, also. This is where alternatives need to be considered carefully - providing access to content on-site and off-site effectively is a key requirement for database publishers.

Kelly H. Gay, President and CEO of KnowledgeStorm, heads a company that was born 100 percent online. Like many of the panelists alternative business models that make for their success have less to do with revenue models than with operational models. KnowledgeStorm uses the Internet itself as their primary research vehicle for their online directory of resources to help purchasers of institutional technologies. This allows them to get the latest info not only on products but on the context of purchasing that matters most to the institutional buyer - for example, try finding an inventory management system that can be installed and serviced in New Mexico on Google (don't bother). Payments are based on lead generation, also not terribly new in concept but brought into a new and powerful context via KnowledgeStorm's 80 sites covering markets around the globe. Gay's assertion that "all good business models have been thought of, it's just a matter of timing" is probably the real key to the discussion on content business models these days. We've had the same number of keys on a piano for centuries, but when and how you play them has changed dramatically based on new ways of looking at what creates value in entertainment at a given point in time. It's not that different with music than with any other form of content for creating successful value generation. When folk singer Bob Dylan played an electric guitar in public it was a seminal moment, as Corilee Christou of Reed Business Information noted in this session's Q&A, but at the end of the day he was playing the same notes.

Probably the closest thing to a truly new business model delivered from panel members was offered by Bruce Murray, Co-Founder and CEO of Corzen, Inc. Corzen's brainstorm idea was to crawl Web sites that posted job offerings and resumes,develop statistics and analysis of job markets based on those profiles - and then sell the stats and analysis back to the sites that they had crawled. It takes a certain amount of Moxie in someone to pull off this pre-fab analysis offer (as research and advisory companies can attest), yet Murray has done an excellent job of developing the package to the point where it's becoming an irresistible resource for many job portals and seekers of employment stats. Subscriptions are the key, though custom content is available, and corporate markets loom on the horizon. Corzen's shoestring budget in pulling this off also points to a new aspect in developing online content business models that needs to be monitored carefully: it's not just webloggers who can dream up content easily but anyone with a great idea, some marketing acumen and a little technology. The days of multi-million dollar funding to spring ideas like this from concept to basic revenues are largely behind us. Sweat equity can pay off pretty handsomely in today's content markets underpinned with highly affordable publishing technologies.

What's really driving the push towards experimentation in applying business models? Kelly Gay summed it up pretty succinctly when she said that "the inmates are in charge of the asylum." The real shift is towards models that work for users who are just a click away from giving up on your service for something that fills any number of immediate needs. Personalizing and changing models rapidly to meet the constantly shifting demands of today's content marketplace is probably the largest challenge that today's publishers and aggregators face. Think of it as "extreme marketing." Hope that you're in shape for it...