Chris Tolles, VP of Marketing for Topix.net moderated a panel includind Yves Auger of Transcontinental Media, Adam Bernacki of Leadership Directories and Paul Forster of Indeed. Indeed provides Web jobs content on a pay-per-click model, Yves shepherds technology for Canada's 4th largest pubisher, with both French and English sites on the Web, with advertising on the Web a relatively new revenue model, turning into a source of revenue last year. Adam manages sales and licensing for Leadership Directories, which provides detailed contact information for business professionals, transitioning their business on to the Web with some success; Web clients provide about 45 percent of their revenues. Chris relates how Topix targets content for specific geographies via an ad-supported portal.

Companies admired? Adam: Leadership Directories is like a phone book on steriods, admires tools such as Jigsaw but their most critical value is accuracy, a value above and beyond community and other potential value points for business information. They allocate much of their headcount to ensuring accuracy. Yves: no real example. Paul: About.com was like a network of weblogs before weblogs were invented, they keep the business model simple through their relationship with Google. Paul also looks at Amazon.com, first to harness reviews and ratings.

Changes in the market, is there a difference between advertisers expectations and the people actually reading the content? Yves: high penetration rate of markets, trying to leverage that for communities. LinkedIn? Adam: They have a special demographic, late 40s-early 50s on average, more likely to use print pubications. Don't anticipate that these users will go elsewhere. Job listings, are there tradeoffs by aggregating a relatively few number of sources? Paul: actually aggregate thousands of sources, makes sense to go to a central place to do a common search. Now that newspapers have been aggregated you can't simply tack on classifieds into a monopoly channel. Search makes it critical to return the most relevant results, important to manage the ranking of your content. Who's been contacted by someone they know on LinkedIn that they've been out of touch with? Lots in the room raise their hands.

Newspapers are disaggregating content and advertising, how do you respond? Yves: looking at aggregators to front-end their content, mostly for magazines, need to repurpose content more effectively. Would you use tools such as Spoke or Zoominfo to repurpose your content? Adam: Love Web 2.0 gadgetry, but how do you look at your next $50K technology investment. It's a question of ROI, need to look at what's going to bring in revenues carefully. Introducing a professional networ product based on data that they've collected, will allow users to annotate networks but don't allow them to publish content directly, don't want to be known as "information socialists," need to protect reputation for information accuracy. How do you manage data quality for jobs? Paul: need to filter out spam from job boards, eliminating bad sources.

A lot of the "block and tackling" is the same in publishing as ever, but it's interesting to note how publishers are making decisions based on both reach and content quality that are taking products in different directions in spite of similar goals. On the one hand Leadership Directories keeps the focus on doing what they do best: building a very pure source of high-quality content by their standards for a mostly print-based product. How one transitions out of that model effectively as a new generation moves away from print is a question. On the other hand Indeed works hard on content quality for their online-mined content as well. The bottom line is that content quality will always be an important publishing product attribute and one should not make broad assumptions about a given platform "solving" content quality easily - or meeting an audience's needs on presumed content quality when competitors may be sweating the details on a given platform better than you.

Labels: business information, business models, SIIA Content Forum 2007