Patrick had a very nice slide show of how media models evolved from the Stele of Hammurabi onwards Movement towards free content, distribution of copies costs zero, huge online addressable market, HighBeam responds with two models, HighBeam, which culls $100/yr $30/mo subscription, encyclopedia.com site. Subscription grows modestly, slow growth for B2B online information in 2006. Google is eyeing enterprise space, could be THE aggregator for paid content. Online ads $80 billion by 2011 - Piper Jaffray. Not an infinite enterprise market, lower willingness to pay in India and China, Zoominfo/Trip Advisor replace heretofore expensive-to-create information with machine created information.

Choices? Numa YouTube video, viewed millions of times. STM may be the next to go to more of a free model, Steve Case's next play is revolution health, will probably pay for a lot of content and give it away on a lead generation basis. Lay people now want to read about diseases that impact them. Entertainent? Lives in its own world, you can charge for entertainment on a PPV basis harder for other models. Haven't looked at ads for years with a TiVo. Google is our source for content traffic mostly, a powerful domain name. Gap between subscription DBs and Google to fill? That gap is narrowing, Nexis and Factiva succeed by integrating into workflow.

Time and others learned that keeping it behind the wall kept inventory away from the market, might be better business model. Ads have carried media from the beginning of time. Tom Hogan - Chemical Abstracts brings in $152 million w/o advertising, how will services like this be supported? It all depends on the information. Patrick: thank you. Agrees, but not long ago we thought all information had to be paid for. Will be niches where charging works. Way that people responds to free varies, 40x interaction with free content as opposed to paid content, demand rises hugely when it's free. Hal Espo: even in narrow verticals it's beginning to open up. Google Desktop came along, took away technology as a market advantage. Google made the long tail monetizable.

Great stuff, not sure whether it's the whole answer - I think that social media is going to be the focus of most subscription services moving forward - but it's going to be harder to support subscription based on distribution only models.

Labels: Buying and Selling eContent, events, Patrick Spain