Greg Zorthian of FT; their content is largely the same around the world, online subs about 75,000 online, with typical subscription in $75 dollar range. There's not as much demand for online as for the newspaper in U.S., overseas markets moving faster for online. More push feeds, customized feeds. Expanding their footprint in many formats, requiring many new marketing and pricing strategies. They're good at bringing to the FT, once they're there the content has to sell itself, needs to be more than plain information.

Neil Ashe, CNET: reach 18 million people a day, 3 million video streams a day, more than Comcast. Have ZDnet, Tech Republic, others, in 13 countries, including gaming. "It is the content that matters, at the end of the day," appropriate for an era of consumer control. Views content as text, photos, audio, build environments in which audience controls it according to their tastes.
Do cross promotion on their various networks, ad supported and revenues from marketing partners. "The days of interruption advertising are gone."

Clayton Rose, Internet Broadcasting - owned by broadcasters, 13 million unique views, consortium of major broadcasters. Sees peaks and valleys, learning how to turn TV stations into digital content companies. How do you get people thinking digitally, not just one analog signal. Weatherplus.com competes with weather.com, tremendous amount of interest and change.

Tolman Geffs of JEGI moderates: How do you attract targeted audiences online to regional offerings? Clayton: views Yahoo and Google as partners, has a set up RSS feeds in conjunction with them to provide a roadmap for users to navigate to their content. Syndication technologies may account for 25 percent of revenues. For example, U.S. section of CNN.com, headlines get fed by them on realtime basis, work with their editors to promote local stories, work with both the technology and people side to get syndicators comfortable. Tolman: Which partnerships work, which don't? Clayton: Ones where you don't have leverage don't work. As they've grown, they have more leverage.

Clayton: Neil, what techniques have worked? Neil: search is the online navigation of choice, need to be search-optimized. Online users don't interact that often, a distributed marketplace, need significant sampling to build a large audience. Cross-promotion within networks seem to work best, marrying contextually valuable content with a user's experience. Content syndication also important, CNET.com has about 40 syndication relationships with ESPN, NY Times, etc. Some work better than others, portals don't distribute traffic across a portal, some sections are very small, different mindsets at an MSN, Yahoo or Google. No traffic, syndication fails. Not always where you'd expect it. On gaming site, 100 percent licensed to AOL for 3 years, traffic up every year. it's the experience that wraps around the content that accounts for success (NOTE: see our definition of content on Wikipedia - the experience is PART of the content).

Tolman: FT is small fish in big pond of online competitors, WSJ, etc. how do you compete? Greg: No aspirations to be a force, have a targeted audience, maybe 250,000 available in a 1-2 million universe. Happily others have ceded this market. At top end of pyramid, good for ad rates. Yes, nice to be 5 million, but not driven by that, have good CPMs. Sell three things, subscriptions, traffic and newspaper subscriptions. Have found that you need multiple touch points before they buy, need to touch at least five times before they buy. Don't assume you're not successful after first touch, need to keep on offering samples. Play with free formula to find right breakpoint. Use customer service operation quite a bit, call in to put paper on hold for holiday, will try to upgrade for online subscription, key method for U.S. sales. Tolman: five touches for a buy, how do you manage that? Track subs and conversions, requires patience, some fortitiude, accept lower CPMs on appearance. all part of lifetime value of clients. Lots of cross-referencing.

Tolman: Aggregation, new deals such as Topix and Moreover, leaders in aggregation bought. Aggregation is content, information about information is content. Neil: Web 3.0 is Web 2.0 married with content and scale. Clayton: Within a community, working on a community that can provide content, once users are invested, they come back again and again. Pictures, video, community forums, user content is very important. Greg: We've been in aggregation business forever. Great, but need to go beyond just news, need to look online, what's in the blogs. Add the FT "special sauce." Need a twist that will keep people coming back. Question for FT: managing generational changes. Greg: more of an immediate problem overseas, U.S. print audience is fine (COMMENT: print is a status symbol and appeals to many elite audiences who see it as much as a fashion accessory as much as anything else. Time is a luxury, and to have the time to read the FT is truly a luxury.).

Question: How do you compete with Web 2.0 content, how do you latch on to it. Clayton: In newsrooms, two schools of thought, some see it as the J-school discussion, other side is TV stations have always been about community (?), personally don't see user content as competitive, can help you grow in a particular geography. Neil: have user content on all sites, one of the largest photo sharing communities. Text, photos, video differ but quality still matters. SNL pirated videos are big, quality matters and is popular. Content quality will rise to the top, that will be the evolution of the phenomenon. Greg: Understand that community is important, haven't yet decided how they want to play with it. For blogs, waiting to see what impact they will have on products.

A good panel , showing best practices today from a number of important angles. Things have really progressed quite a bit in the past year, media companies understand engagement and being part of the conversation inherently, but as Neil points out there's a level of discomfort with not being able to control where the message is going. It's still a very distribution-centric business in an era in which distribution has been taken over in large part by the audience. Many have started to engage this issue, but it's early days.