Moderator: Rafat Ali, Editor, paidContent.org and MocoNews.net

Panelists:
Barak Berkowitz, CEO and Chairman, SixApart
Michael Birch, Co-Founder and CEO, Bebo.com
Tariq Krim, Co-CEO and Founder, NetVibes
Richard Rosenblatt, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO, Demand Media
Herb Scanelli, CEO, Next New Networks

As I am waiting for the panel to sit down, I have to reflect on the scale of this event. paidContent.org is dissed sometimes as being a lightweight in a field of heavies, yet it's ability to build a cross-sector nation of people interested in the future of content is impressive. Core online heavyweights, mobile, entertainment, news, B2B - all have a finger in this event.

Rafat's intro: Primarily focused event on entertainment and media, trying to have it as "social" as possible, will run it as a talk show, will jump into audience after a while.

Rafat: How do you see yourself in social media?

Barak: See social media as a broad horizontal application, everybody will have places where they can express themselves via social media technology.

Michael: Entered market in July 2005, late in this space, in this time became 3rd largest social network in US, bigger in UK and New Zealand, cross between Facebook and MySpace.

Tariq: Founded in 2005, personalization and the ability to discover content is crucial to the online economy.

Richard: Interested in passionate verticals, bought a number of companies towards that goal. First company allowed merchants to build their own stores, spent years trying to empower users to create their own media.

Herb: Broadcasting is about broad audiences, cable more niche, social media even finer communities

Rafat: How to build a brand? Herb: provides navigation for users and surety for advertisers, but brands have to go where the users are. We want to go where the audience is, brand building a combination of making stuff that people love and having people who count in a community and distributing content the way that they want it. TV hasn't had hit since Friends, hits aren't going to happen any more, brands will happen amongst people connected via a passion. These will be the new verticals.

Rafat: What's required for scale? Richard: Bebo used to be just a startup, now the 3rd largest network. For some people who are passionate about verticals you don't want to invite people to an empty party. Buy properties build community around them (COMMENT: pretty much the standard game plan for publishing, nothing new).

Rafat: Built a hot company in France, how difficult is it to build one in Europe? Tariq: Difficult to go from an idea to a product, telcos will stifle any pure plays that upset their position, diversity of languages, required localization to build community. Now we're localized for any country in the world. Europe is a broadband arena, video is huge and the quality is excellent. Rafat: success in terms of audience only? How to make money? Tariq: The Web page as we know it will disappear, NetVibes provides interface where a user can do anything. (COMMENT: publishers are just catching up with the Web as a whole, monetizing widgets is the new frontier and few are ready). Widgets can be monetized but value proposition requires widget to respond to exactly what you want, service will be key.

Rafat: Michael, British-based with US presence, how do you manage that? Around less than two years as a social network, only in key English-speaking markets, can generate greater ad revenue in UK, but a smaller population. The US is a very key market to us, growing as quickly as in any other market. When we launched UK is typically behind US but launched as a mature product, took off in US in pockets, within certain markets Bebo dominates, CA is not a strong market, but succeeding overall. Spent a long time catching up, reached that stage only recently.

Rafat: Barak, you started out as a blogging tool, typically social media company launches with service and then makes a platform available, you did it the other way around, where's the most platform? Barak: In both, TypePad for people who want a low barrier to entry, some very large media blogs on TypePad, LiveJournal youth-oriented, Vox aimed at older community. We make money depending on who's the customer and what they want to do. Focus on giving customer a great experience and apply that knowledge more broadly. Rafat: Are you happy with how it is going, how do blogging tools improve? Barak: Be able to handle more media, become faster, easier to use, not the end of these tools, becoming more critical tools, email not disappearing, blogging tools are in their infancy.

Rafat: Richard, how do you see state of tools for blogging and other media? Richard: Netvibes will address where the user collects it all, users have three or four different profiles around the Web, how do you pull it all together (COMMENT: personal aggregation - The New Aggregation model was ahead of itself...:-) ). One location makes it easier to provide a personal presence online? Rafat: Can you build a company now based on the idea that you can be better than MySpace? Michael: YouTube wouldn't have succeede without being so successful on MySpace, but now its success can allow it to continue on its own. We allow widget companies to invent with us but we ask for a revenue share, Bebo drives as much traffic to YouTube as MySpace. Herb: Part of the mix of how you become a larger entity over time. Richard: Major social networks look at each page as a place to build ad revenues, if you're building your business off of APIs you need to avoid PhotoBucket example of being turned off by a partner. Tariq: Web pages aren't going to disappear altogether, we're looking at how to build a business model over multiple distribution methods, APIs and syndication is becoming the new distribution model (??) will become key for social media. We are going to see more widgets and people will distribute widgets to their friends.

Staci: We always have something online, what happens when we want to go offline? Barak: We don't build our products with the assumption that people are always connected, our interpretation is that information is that urgent to get in IM and email is not always the most precious information, the things that you care about most is not always urgent but important far beyond emails and phone calls, making content permanent and storable when people care about it is key. Can well be years after it was put up. People see the power of the Web as a place to store their life, meaning is in the content that can be stored. Staci: my power was out for a week, can't take streaming video on a plane, does that matter? Tariq: Social media tools are about connecting, in Europe it's a bit different, mobile is a key device, offline you still have your mobile, being offline and doing nothing is a good thing as well.

Keith, Edgio: revenues morph, Doubleclick won the first phase, phase two was about monetizing the exit, AdSense, can you get paid for people leaving your portal, now it seems as if social media has not found its model. Is there something to be learned from newspapers, social media and the like, they make money from their readers from classifieds, can you make money from readers making comments on one another? Michael: many SM companies are not focused on revenues, more on scale, clearly a good model about classifieds, we have many ideas beyond classifieds, at absolute infancy. Richard: Why are people at that social network, are they passionate aobut he group or about meeting people in that group. Bought trails.com, whether they're there to meet people is more of a by-product. Herb: also important to reach the trend-setters. Barak: also important to identify that it's important to have a conversation (COMMENT: THAT's what I am talking about - it's not about the monologue, advertisers need to learn how to maintain a dialogue). Estelle: Are you still planning to have your own ad sales forces? How do you maintain ad inventory? Tariq: Moving to a stage where we're monetizing attention more than audience. So many choices, which service am I going to be using, metrics are different based on desire to interact, have to pay attention that advertising is not always relevent anymore, need to provide a service to build a relationship, when you see AdWords you have a low value, the service needs to learn about you and adapt. Have been approached by large brands to ask how to succeed online when people aren't going to Web sites anymore. Michael: You reach a tipping point that makes sense to bring it in-house with a team that really understands your own product and can pitch the benefits. Becomes a two-way conversation, challenge is to sell large page inventory at huge CPM. Did a campaign with Skittles, listed skins that people can use to decorate Bebo, got views of skins on other people's profiles, users promote (COMMENT: Have to leverage the value of personal endorsement). Barak, the close relationships come from our direct sales team. Herb: The best people to tell your story are your own people.

Rafat: When you're building a new brand without an audience, what do you tell them? Herb: you tell a story nevertheless. Tad Smith: NewsCorp has made hay with MySpace acquisition, how would an independent MySpace be different? MySpace was at an interesting point in its development, different capitalization structure, small public company, had we not sold to NewsCorp we would have not had the capital for infrastructure. Sounds contrarian but it's probably bigger as a result. Would we have blocked widgets? Don't know, don't know that we would have done any thing differently. Today it's much easier to raise capital. Most media companies said no, it was way expensive, "a bunch of teens posting photos," others could survive on their own but investors need the stomach to understand how to monetize social media.

Rafat: You were on the team that was on the team that was trying to buy MySpace - Jason - You are so dead now. The future is about creating a platform for your audience to tell their story, Rupert was more aggressive, paid off way bigger than they thought it would pay off, would I overpay for a platform like Bebo? Probably yes, especially if it wasn't my own money. Question: users voluntarily aligning with brand, what should the standards be? Michael: Example was lead by sales team not bizdev team, people are used to pricing things on a CPM basis, pricing models needed to be invented, had to measure how people viewed skin, looking at profiles. Try to demonstrate effectiveness, metrics seem to underpin that but need more than banners on a CPM basis. Sometimes the parts difficult to sell are thrown in with CPM sales.

Question: How do you make a universal ID portable across message board sites, etc? Richard: starts with your own domain, some of the things that we focus on are one platform that provides a portable profile that allows you to jump from one site to another but that lets you change your profile on each different site, go to the golf site and people see you as the golf pro, as a runner on the running site. But outside of those sites you will need some sort of universal login, but if the user is in control of their own media you need to allow for this. Every publisher will have an opportunity to get paid for what they do, details to follow. Barak: Working with AOL on a way to authenticate across the Web (OpenID), always relates to your core domain, very simple model.

Question: Monetization around profiles are the examples, is that the key to revenues or is it in the portal model of driving people into advertising? FaceBook moving into NBA brackets, etc. Tariq: We first ask a user for personalization information so that they can tailor information, we keep what we like and eliminate what you don't like, trying to figure out where the attention is going, both are interesting model. Rafat: Yahoo is going similar things. Tariq: We are independent and neutral, connecting with everyone, not our job to say that you should use Gmail or anything else, the more that they use the widgets the more that they interact with a site, this is absolutely what's going to drive monetization. If I am happy with a widget I am going to send it to a friend. Question: We produce video, vision is interesting but you are betting on a different strategy, could three of you be wrong and being setting up a level of expectations that are too high? In the greater Web Google and Yahoo printing money, is there way too much expectation to live up to for investors? Richard: not so much us hyping social media as everyone else, three years ago DoubleClick was dead, now find, Amazon was dead, just had a blowout quarter. But we need to show more real data, started with one site that was in bankruptcy, had thousands of articles, used it to test thousands of micro-communities, traffic grew 10-15 percent on the site just by adding community. Google lists the articles and the community grows around it. Hopefully we go beyond the hype to true results.

Labels: econSM, events