Frank Bilotto is VP of Publishing and Digital Media at MuseGlobal, Inc. but he's also known increasingly for his entertaining "undiscovered genius" interviews. Under Ezra Swets has grown significantly through canny acquisitions and intelligent positioning of its electronic products. Frank noted that Ezra is a proponent of the "long tail" concept of content marketing, essential for the scientific/academic sector. Unlike other publishing sectors, in which typically 80 percent of your revenues may come from only 20 percent of your titles, scientific publishing relies on selling a broad array of niche content. Frank noted that in his Dialog days only a handful of content sources actually attracted revenues and the rest operated at a relative loss. But in ecommerce, Ezra notes, players such as Amazon rely on the drip-dripping of small sales along the long tail to drive them to profitability. This is important in the scholarly sector, he notes, as new R&D markets such as Singapore show increased demand for scholarly literature.

In institutional settings, though, sales are more complex than in the consumer sector. Oftentimes scholarly content providers find themselves selling at the national level. Ezra notes that exposing content in their long tail sometimes means working with clients to let them know that they have rights to their content from existing services and it's just a matter of letting users know - so that it's part of a budget. [COMMENT: Very similar to what's happened in financial market data for decades.] In China, for example, you're selling through four consortia to the entire nation. China will buy a trial to content "X" and see who accesses it and will then dictate the price to the publisher. This provides motivation for publishers to make sure that their target markets are aware that they have access to their content. "It's not just switching deck chair, there's opportunity for new business," Ezra notes.

Ezra sees the aggregation of sources from established publishers helps to increase the awareness of "credentialed" premium sources that helps scientists move more easily from one discovery to another. Librarians still recommend and teach audiences about their content but increasingly they rely on publishers to help them make their users aware of publications. Swets tries to make the librarian the "hero" in their organizations as they help to promote content that's useful. ROI? How do you compete in the long tail? Ezra: metadata, metadata, metadata. If you're not out there being noticed via metadata and other key elements that expose content to searches then you're not competing in the long tail. Small publishers need to invest in it especially so that they can stand out on a crowd. There is also the long tail of customers, with the 60,000 major institutions of the world being joined by more people purchasing in a procurement mode for small corporates and governments. So as the client bases expand, you have to make sure that you're promoting content to end users. This requires publishers and aggregators to accept that librarians don't like bundling of "the good stuff" with weaker titles, but publishers push harder on such packaging. The key is to work with clients to find packaging that will work for individual customers.

This was a good session, but I wonder about how quickly scientific publishers are really moving in to the true "long tail" of publishing. The problem with China sales point out the long-term problem: when you sell large collections on a licensing basis, you think that you're locking in long-term success but what you're also doing is locking in long-term pressure on margins from customers. But Ezra is highly innovative in conceiving of the need to promote content on a grass-roots basis by bringing the publisher's message directly to academic audiences. The methodology is still primitive, and the question of how to do this more effectively via Web search engines and social media is still on the horizon, but Ezra is clearly interested in pushing innovative concepts for traditional publishers.

Labels: Frank Bilotto, MuseGlobal, SIIA Content Forum 2007, Swets