SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: Content Creating Conversations - Liberty Carras, CNNMoney.com
Liberty Carras, SVP for CNNMoney.com, focused on how they are merging social media and traditional reporting as they develop engaging online content. In their "Assignment Detroit" sub-portal, CNNMoney.com is building what is in essence an evergreen in-depth documentary, filled with both breaking news and investigative reporting as well as social media input. CNNMoney.com's stimulus tracker provide interactive graphic analysis of how government expenditures have been telling a story that engages people both through their using the tool and the more than 1,200 user comments that the tool has generated. The essence of story-telling, then, is in some ways what it has been always, but with the interactivity of the Web and its ability to collect content from anyone at any location or time is turning story-telling into more of a group around a campfire than a "sage on the stage" dictation. Clean graphics are also a key, making it easier to digest information easily, shown in a redesign of one of CNNMoney.com's company information page. Amazing design also helps CNNMoney.com's advertisers to provide more enveloping and engaging messages, attracting larger online ad units.
Liberty showed the following Charles Schwab video available on YouTube, originally produced as an in-house video for their employees but that became an online ad campaign, turning compelling corporate content rapidly into high-value ad units. Finding how to put the assets together with amazing creative and compelling experiences, with great metrics, yields great results. Great examples of great Content from CNNMoney.com's "Best Places to Live" and their now-integrated Fortune "100 Best Companies" list, which integrates with Time print properties, is also an important part of a great content strategy, starting with a story and then thinking about how to execute it in great media. Having great metrics that drive your sales team and managing them with commitment is also key, Liberty noted. She provided a video demo of some Apple tablet features, what impressed me most was the alleged integration for education. Education is where Apple got its early market strength, perhaps the tablet will be where it rediscovers new mojo for educational content.
This was a great keynote; sometimes the picture of how to look like a success online is worth a thousand words.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: Information Wants to Be Expensive
Moderator: Henry Blodget, CEO & Editor-in-Chief, The Business Insider Panelists: Gaby Darbyshire, COO, Gawker Media Cheryl Milone, CEO, Article One Partners, LLC Jim Fowler, CEO, Jigsaw Data Corporation
Gaby Darbyshire kicked off the panel with a great summary of the shifting role of blogs and traditional news outlets, emphasizing that in a world in which facts can be collected so easily many traditional media organizations are going to have to focus on more in-depth analysis and commentary, a trend already underway in some ways. Cheryl Milone's Article One Partners helps patent holders increase quality and avoid disputes through a global research community. Jim Fowler runs Jigsaw's crowdsourced database of company and contact information, building "data as a service" capabilities for both enterprises and individuals, piping real-time updates to them as their sources provide validated information.
"Nobody cares about privacy," Jim notes, meaning that in an era in which basic facts on people are so widely available, the fact that people are contributing information about other people who they have in their contacts is an accepted practice these days. This allows Jigsaw to deliver content updates more rapidly through disruptive a business model than incumbents such as Dun and Bradstreet, Henry Blodget noted. Henry emphasized the importance of "good enough" information from disruptors such as Gawker, but often in business information "good enough" that's more up-to-date and accurate in domains that traditional sources simply don't collect is more than good enough - it's better, at least for a limited range of content.
What happens to companies like The New York Times in this mix? Gaby noted that it will be more towards 2011 before the Times implements this approach, perhaps allowing the idea to percolate through people's minds, much in the way that politicians sometimes leak ideas of what they may be doing to gauge public reaction to the idea and others' implementations before committing to a new model. This is probably especially important, given their semi-retreat from a hybrid paid model. Henry noted a newspaper that had spend $4 million on implementing a paywall system that elicited only 35 signups, which may be part of the reason for this gun-shyness, but my assumption is that NYT and others will be implementing this new service on a phased rollout basis, trying via an A/B testing regimen where the value points may be.
Why don't traditional firms do more of what the disruptors? Cheryl notes that they incentivize their community, with seven-figure payouts in some instances for providing research, so it's a model that may be foreign to their competitors. Jim noted that the real-time update nature of their content's change is the real value point; instead of selling data per se, they focus on selling freshness within their domain. 40 percent of Jigsaw's enterprise clients share their data, presumably in most instances from their "golden source" master files. Knowing that having this information provides limited competitive advantage on a proprietary basis, Jigsaw clients gladly trade breadth of older data with freshness from whatever source it comes from. This creates, Jim believes, "why would I go anywhere else" types of business models.
It turns out, Henry believes, that it can be very hard for a company to fight off a disruptor that is using technologies that aren't scaled to take advantage of their traditional strengths. Gaby sees publishers such as the NYT "hide-bound" by their attachment to their traditional image of well-established success, whereas sites like Gawker focus more on site metrics to understand what content is successful in the moment. The way to build a sustained audience via these metrics is to do more in-depth content in ways that print journalism can't do effectively. Traditional "credibility" and "brilliance" aren't similar metrics and harder to monetize, ultimately, in the moment-by-moment world of Web publishing. Henry suggests that the NYT should consider looking at the 20 percent of their writers that produce 80 percent of their revenues and to either teach the others to do what they do - and, presumably, to suggest alternatives for them if they can't.
"Be impatient for profit, but patient for growth," Jim observes, pointing out that it's important for disruptors to work hard to find winning formulas that will scale, rather than scaling before you understand what really works. It's good business sense, but a concept that was neglected in the Blodget-driven dot-com era's focus on clicks rather than sustainable business models. Jim notes that late entrants can go out and buy players to help them catch up with the disruptors, but Gaby notes that "you can milk the cash cow, but eventually the cow will die." As traditional media shrinks, buying or killing your competitors will become harder for established media companies.
In the short run, large companies looking at disruptors may try to minimize them, but since many of these companies are small private companies that can innovate and change plans without as much scrutiny and legal overhead, it's hard to ignore them. On the other hand, sometimes disruptors can be "frenemies," as in Jigsaw's successful business relationship with Dun and Bradstreet that supplies D&B with Jigsaw content. "They've been a great partner for us, they've taught us a ton about how to sell our data and it gives it credibility," he notes. Win-win partnerships can work out often, and I agree with Ken Doctor that many media companies will be seeking these kinds of partnerships as they see key capabilities being developed by others that they cannot replicate effectively.
Great panel, I have to get ready for my presentation, now, thanks to Henry for doing a great job of leading a great discussion.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: Economic Impact Research, published by FreePint
Robin Neidorf, General Manager of Free Pint, Limited, highlighted research into the buying habits based on a survey of FreePint subscribers fielded in mid-2009. About 49 percent of respondents had centralized information centers, with 32 percent having multiple locations throughout their organisations. Most respondents reported no increases in staffing, a third reported decreases, and about ten percent reported staffing increases. Increased staffs staffs were most common in companies with high-budget profiles. Many of the respondents were indicating that automation and technology solutions are key to filling staffing gaps and using content resources to fill staffing gaps, presumably in the automated and online services provided by content vendors. Some indicated budgets would be going up, but apparently free substitutes are increasing. "We've moved the cost of premium services to the end party," Robin noted. A la carte sales are becoming the order of the day in many instances. an opportunity for vendors to understand how to maximize their relationships with individual content consumers before, during and after purchases.
In sum, things weren't as bloody last year as people feared, but as we're seeing in Shore's New Rules of Engagement research fielded over the past few weeks, this doesn't mean that there aren't major change underway. Sounds like a good traditional report on FreePint's subscription base.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: Ken Doctor on the Tablet Era of News
News expert Ken Doctor of Content Bridges focused initially in his talk on the debuting Apple tablet and its promise, which is, in a nutshell, its big advertising potential with its better reading experience. Ken sees some potential for the Apple tablet to support news operations better, but he also noted that there is 40 percent less newsprint than there was a year ago and 20 percent less newsroom staff. The tablet looks great, but where is the content going to come from? A lot of it has, of course, migrated to the Web, oftentimes to startup operations founded by journalists laid off by traditional news operations. Scrappy operations such as these with highly affordable publishing infrastructure and simply implemented ad revenues will be the focus of may eyeballs that major news organizations would like to capture. Ken noted Outsell research shows that 57 percent of consumers go to the Web already in the U.S. for news, with 25 percent using the Web sites of broadcast news sites daily. Ten percent say that they would pay for news - which correlates nicely with Gordon Crovitz' seat-of-the-pants number that he's been using to promote his Journalism Online initiative with Steve Brill. I think that this is a good industry heuristic for consumer-oriented online content at this point, presuming that you have a strong online brand.
But Ken also pointed out that many companies are spending heavily on self-marketeing; in other words, what is traditional media when your advertisers know how to "do" media themselves? Ken noted that he believes that 12 or 15 large news companies will continue to dominate, but with due respect, I think that in five years we will see far closer to five large news players worldwide, with the remaining properties being either gone or relaunched by people who care about their local news markets as independent brands that are web-scaled, lean and mean, and able to gain good audiences through search engines and social media links instead of having to rely on services such as AP and large media companies to broaden the appeal of their content. I agree with Ken that major companies can become virtual aggregators themselves via licensing to use other outlets' content to build the reach of other content properties, but this is a technique that any publisher of any scale can use. Automated content licensing will accelerate this process to the most effective outlets, which may or may not be Ken's "digital dozen."
At the same time, Ken notes that News Corporation is an example of a diversified media company that is using revenues from entertainment properties such as the $2-billion hit movie "Avatar" to fuel their operations. That will work for some time as a scaling issue, but Ken noted that the cost structure for many of these conglomerates' operations will not sustain them on a reliable basis. Beats me how this math will work for long, especially when, as Ken points out, the Bit.ly link referral is processing two billion link referrals a month. Value each of those links at a dollar, which is not too far off the mark given online ad rates, then you have an "Avatar"'s worth of ad revenues being generated by Content Nation every day via social media.
Will the tablet be the convergence of social, mobile and video that many in the media industry hope that it will be? Well, I am sure that the tablet will be impressive, but given that we've had color screens staring us in our living rooms for fifty years and PC screens for thirty years, I am not sure what it is about Steve Jobs that will overcome decades of media company failure to learn how to tailor mass media to interactive content markets. The gains of online video services such as Hulu are impressive, but are dwarfed by Content Nation's production on services such as YouTube. Aggregating social media and traditional media will be the key to the emerging model of success in this environment, as Ken highlighted in a Seattle effort to aggregate area blogs and other content sources.
I do think that local aggregation efforts such as Ken's Seattle example are now feasible on a cost-effective scale and will represent one of the most exciting stories for news production in 2010. For a great example of this, I refer you to the emerging Patch local news service sponsored by AOL, which resembles a business plan that I floated for local news about ten years ago just prior to the dot-com crash in 2000. Ten years later, technologies, ad networks and pervasive social media are combining to make a combination of professional and citizen-generated content economically viable.
The other side of the news equation that Ken touched on is the transformation of advertising into contextual content placement, in which journalists find themselves increasingly working for the advertisers to generate content instead of the news outlets. It's cheap content, often, and far from high quality at times, but thinking of newspapers filled with lightly retouched press releases passed off as journalism and the fawning of media for leads and coverage that throws objectivity under the bus too often, it's a matter of the name of the master sometimes and not the evil.
At the end of the day, the issue is revenues. "There's not enough revenue to do what we used to do," notes Ken, and chasing what Ken calls "interim technology." There are no magic technology bullets that will return an era that no longer exists, but there are strategies to move forward. Ken suggests:
Make it social
Approach the "digital dozen"
Gather other people's content
Drive your publishing business with data
All good recommendations, though ones that any Web publishers can apply also, including enterprises reaching their markets directly via the Web. News is a great business, perhaps closer to its original roots today than it's been in many years, but it's not the "Mad Men" business that some yearn for even today. Great presentation, Ken, enjoyed it.
CEO Outlook: In Search of New Business Models Fear, Greed and Hope As Traditional Media Go into Free Fall
Moderator: Jim Kollegger, CEO, Genesys Partners, Inc. Panelists: Mark Anderson, CEO, Strategic News Service Andrew Lack, CEO Multimedia Group, Bloomberg LP Dick Harrington, Chairman and General Partner, The Cue Ball Group David Eun, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships, YouTube
Jim Colleger has an amazing knack to assemble impressive C-level panelists, this one was no exception. Jim kicked off his "skate to where the puck is" session by asking Dick Harrington how he made the decision to sell Thomson's print divisions at more than $4 billion. Dick noted that he saw that eBay was growing rapidly and was typical of services that were going to kill newspaper classified advertising. But Harrington noted also that in B2B markets Thomson developed technology assets that enabled them to provide workflow-based products and services in a more client-centric approach to enterprise publishing. Thomson Reuters is still a work in progress, but how far it came under Harrington's leadership is impressive.
Andrew Lack of Bloomberg, LP's multimedia group was brought on to help Bloomberg integrate their media assets more effectively. He enjoys not having "analysts crawling up your backside" as being part of a private company, which enables it to look at the cost structure for its 2,000-plus reporters around the world and to repurpose them aggressively for professional audiences through media and enterprise distribution channels. Of course, when Bloomberg's revenues come primarily from its enterprise financial trading services, you have the luxury of looking at media markets with the comfort of stronger financial support than many news media companies face. Lack wants Bloomberg to be "among the most influential news producers in the world," but not with the same profit requirements hanging over their heads that a company such as Dow Jones may face with a far less robust enterprise revenue stream. Lack is planning to take these news assets and focus more on consumer markets, presumably, as I noted earlier in ContentBlogger, to take on Dow Jones' recently consolidated enterprise and media assets more effectively. Lack didn't give too many hints on competing with the WSJ Online "freemium" model, but it's a given that they will have that option based on their strong branding from enterprise markets that appeals to many consumer investors.
David Eun focused on YouTube's relationship to Google's overall mission, seeing video as data that can be connected with audiences. Google takes a long-term view of markets at YouTube, seeing that it would need to be easy to use as the key goal. The growth of YouTube is staggering, with more than a billion views per day, but business models are now a key focus also. This seems to sync in with Ken Auletta's earlier comments about driving more revenues from premium content, and certainly syncs with YouTube's efforts to deliver more premium content via YouTube. It turns out that free is amazing and great, but people like paying for stuff, too.
Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service noted that the concept of value is key to success in content markets, where there is more direct pay for value and less emphasis on ad-supported access. He notes, though, that Google's "fortuitous" implementation of ads as their revenues sources changed everything. Today, kids don't expect to pay for media ever. "That's a long time to wait," Anderson notes. The old world of "I'll tell you what to watch and when to watch it" is gone, though, and the customer's perception of value is in the drivers' seat. There is a generational gap, however, in which more adult people are more willing to pay, be it just general maturity or a generational difference. He believes that these people entering the workforce will be willing to pay for services such as Westlaw (I am not sure that our own research bears that out).
David Eun pointed out, though, that there are many different kinds of value transactions. "The challenge is that most [video] advertising doesn't work, you have to put the right ad in front of the right person at the right time." Eun believes that ads will work, especially if you think of ads as content, and begin to think not just about keyword matches but audience matches. Thinking of Apple's iTunes store, he sees that people are willing to pay for well-designed, convenient services, a concept that should be applicable to other types of content. Lack noted that the model for purchasing music via iTunes is not attractive to most music producers, but with the music industry competing with piracy at the time and seeing its whole model going down the drain rapidly, he was able to corral music publishers into the iTunes platform fairly rapidly. Today, he notes, subscription models have new meaning, in part because of iTunes and other mobile-oriented ecommerce models.
Jim asked if today's Kindles and tablets are actually dedicated terminals in a different packages. Anderson noted that there is a limit as to how many of these devices people will buy. "It's all going to the same place, it's nine inches by seven inches and will do your email." To me, that is a compelling rationale for cost-effective, open source Google Chrome OS devices conquering the tablet markets globally in 2011. Harrington notes, though, that you have to be very vertical, rather than very horizontal, to make money in the content industry today. He's right in an important way, of course, but that's not necessarily a concept that you can tie to a hardware platform: a tablet is not a vertical any more than a Bloomberg terminal is, or was, a vertical. It's the markets that they serve that are verticals, verticals which are increasingly real-time verticals of markets as small as one or a few people in a given moment.
This has been a great panel, though my overall impression is that although most publishers have accepted the reality of digital markets, they have not necessarily accepted their place in them. I agree with Mark Anderson that publishers shouldn't be shy about charging for valuable products and services, but it has to be more than a self-declared artificial scarcity that defines the uniqueness and value of their capabilities. The three billion-plus people empowered as publishers around the world, including businesses that are using content to create transactions on a different level than most publishers do, are competing for the value equation of publishing. What we're talking about emerging is a robust but far more specialized publishing industry which still provides highly valuable content, often on a paid basis, but which recognizes that the world has moved on to an era in which they can no longer dictate platforms arbitrarily and expect to succeed for any significant length of time.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: eBooks: Will They Endure or are They Just a Steppingstone?
Moderator: Jan Palmen, SVP, Publishing Services, Innodata Isogen Panelists: Nick Bogaty, Senior Business Development Manager, Adobe Systems, Inc. Christopher Brown, Director, Pearson Larry Schwartz, President, Newstex, LLC
What is an ebook? The panel offered various opinions, I liked Larry Schwartz's perspective, noting that he is distributing blogs in the same format as ebooks in some instance. Larry noted that 47 percent of ebook readers had viewed them on computers, with only a small percentage of these on ebook readers, and the ebook market overall still being a small percentage of the book market overall. The big issue for ebooks today, though, is not so much it total audience as it is how to get the market as a whole to grow across platforms. Nick Bogaty of Adobe still sees Amazon's Kindle as the leading platform, even as others enter the fray (it will be interesting to see what happens on the 27th with Apple's expected tablet announcement, rumors of a tie-up between Barnes & Noble and Apple are flying about). Chris Brown of Pearson noted that they are trying to balance focusing on users as authors along with working with traditional publishers.
Larry noted that this period of ebooks as one that is still very early days with non-color displays, he sees Apple's iPhone and soon Apple's tablet may help markets for ebooks to grow rapidly. He notes that everyone want the "holy grail" device, they don't want to travel with just another device. If you're on your couch, that's one thing, but for a business person it's different. Nick noted that customers have demonstrated that much demand for ebooks in trade, but in higher education and education in general there is much stronger demand. Christopher underscored this point, though he points out that the ebook reading devices are quite limited today for educational purposes. Asked later in the session if he thought that Apple's tablet would be an effective platform, he said simply, "I don't know."
Multimedia offers new opportunities for book publishers in this environment, he notes. However, when you are trying to distribute syndicated content through the day onto an ebook reader, though, Larry noted that the limited bandwidth available on Kindle's wireless network for downloads makes multimedia and blog distribution on Kindle and other devices that package in "free" wireless access impractical. However, there is a gadget "blip" in the short term for ebooks, Larry said, where new ebook reader releases tend to be followed by bursts of downloads of paid content onto the devices. However, this isn't really going to lead to long-term success if people aren't engaged with the content once it's downloaded. Christoper observed, rightly, I believe, that the people who said "content is king" and failed to adapt their products to mobile platforms effectively are now having to think differently.
Nick Bogaty noted that this is likely to be the year of the iSlate, but then interestingly noted that there would be many tablets will be coming out this year, emphasizing the importance of content portability. This means Adobe as a solution to Nick, but Jan Palmen noted that perhaps the issue is not so much portability but what a book really is at this time. Perhaps content aggregation is no longer going to be defined by publishers but consumer-based, at some point. Eleanor Haas noted in a comment that she advises customers to refer to their books as "titles" for their books, so that they can find them as products, but to lose the term "book" as a marketing tool. I think that this is a good approach. The "title" may be user-defined, but my sense is that the book publishing industry as we know it today will split into those who will enable user-defined collections of content from any number of sources, including self-published ebooks that have gained an online publishing, and on the other hand those who will look at the "best of the best" opportunities arising from online content packaging that can be given packaging for more permanent and broad distribution, be it through print or online models. The latter business will have great revenues, but the online model will be the one with better margins.
Color content is a promised new frontier from Apple's iSlate for ebook and emagazine content, but I think that this is another false hope for traditional publishers. We have had a color ebook reader for years; it's called a personal computer. What about an iSlate that is going to persuade publishers to commit to packaging on this new platform other than the obvious one: an online store with proprietary rights. As Larry Schwartz notes, Apple's announcement may be important as a catalyst to move publishers into ebook-style models, but unfortunately for these publishers their customers have been spending most of their time with other forms of online content for decades. Kudos to Apple for devising a seductive way to allow media companies to feel that they have surrendered to online markets with dignity, but ultimately that battle was lost long ago when HTML started forming readable content on millions of PCs around the world. It's great to see the market for ebooks developing rapidly, I hope that it grows based on Web standards that allow traditional editorial staffs to do what they do best while enabling premium packaging specialists to do what they do best as well.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010 Previews: HearPlanet, ORLive, Snac Inc.
Steven Echtman, Founder & CEO, HearPlanet
iPhone app that provides text-to-audio for reference and services. Multimedia content "that enriches your experience in the moment." Aggregates content from different sources such as tour guides, Wikipedia, enabling different voices. Integrates with map functions, coming out on Android shortly. Looking to aggregate and distribute broadly. Nokia, RIM, feature phones targeted also, looking to target navigation companies. In top 50 iPhone apps in 2009. Content is personalized, an "army" of voice artists. Monetizes through freemium downloads, ads, sponsors, partners such as Starbucks, OpenTable, CitySearch. Not an unusual model overall, but the audio is an interesting angle, audio is hot right now and others are lagging in services and content technologies (my Nexus One excluded, natch :-). If you're developing mobile apps, here's a content partner that can help you to enrich your tool rapidly.
Ross Joel, CEO & Co-founder, ORLive, Inc.
Physicians are videotaping their medical procedures, they provide a community that collects and organizes this content, partners such as Elsevier, some content is developed by ORLive, others are submitting directly. Audiovisual-equipped operating rooms, branded channels available. Not a high-volume model, very targeted distribution, but still 2.5 million uniques and 85,000 registrants. Helps to drive patient volumes (equals sales), increases procedure adoption rates, improves training on new equipment. Claims ROI exceeds 1000% regularly. An excellent, focused product that makes the best of content, community and online distribution models for professional markets. "Operationally funded." Kudos.
Mark Caron, CEO, Snac Inc.
Mobile apps services, ex-OmniPoint/T-Mobile networks, average movile site gets only average 2 uniques per month (this is a key point, search and social media not available to expose these apps effectively, can't "tweet" them easily). Carriers "lock down" users, similar to aggregators locking out publishers from database discovery stats. Snac offers a customizable dashboard for mobile discovery. Downloadable app, alternative home screen, integrated search use environment. Has won awards. There's some potential on the top end of the market, especially since there's still a lot of platform and carrier balkanization, but I'd say that feature phones are the most likely target. "Walled Garden" approach offers promise for content producers trying to devise their own strategy for telco networks that's more consistent across carriers and platforms. Not on iPhone, they exclude, of course. Cross-platform approaches are key, interesting tool towards that goal.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: Where is the Money in Custom Publishing
Moderator: Gregory Brown, Senior Director, Strategic Development, DataStream Content Solutions (DSCS) Panelists: David Prichard, President & CEO, Ingram Content Group, Inc. Matt Turner, Senior Consultant, Mark Logic Corporation Steven Alperin, Entrepreneur in Residence, MyWire, Consultant ABC , MyWire, Week's Best
Skip Prichard highlighted some of the tailored publications that they produce, one unit at a time. Their average run is 1.8 books. They find customers from both major players like Amazon and major bookstores but also small local retailers. Either way they're making money. Matt Turner was asked by Gregory about custom publishing beyond print. They can feed single-unit print cycles, but they have done far more with partners such as Wiley enables publishers to replace back-end operations that are used to create books more cost-effectively. Mark Logic sees custom publishing as pervasive, moving into workflow products also on electronic platforms. Steven Alperin came from a mass media background, but now focuses at MyWire on how to access audiences in ways that help them be more engaged with content on a personal basis.
What does it take to enable technology to get content to work effectively in a custom publishing environment? Matt noted success needs to be hinged around a company invested in the idea of custom content, the technology is there, but there's a mind shift that needs to occur. In terms of what needs to be invested in, Skip noted that you can't invest in everything, but tools like VitalSource can help publishers not only to package content but to offer feedback on usage and, via social networking tools, feedback on the content itself to refine the product constantly. Matt noted that the investments are largely there, now, with the trend towards customizing being driven by the opportunities being revealed by platforms that are already good at repurposing. "Content that wants to be expensive tends to be really, really narrow sets of content that custom publishing can reveal," Matt noted. Investigating your usage data is one of the key opportunities to understand custom publishing opportunities and to define them, noted Steven.
I agree with the panelists that custom publishing needs to be elevated radically from a sideline to a core rationale for premium publishing. Recently I received a post card invitation to an upcoming publishers' conference. Not only was the card tailored to me personally but the conference organizers had created a custom Web address personalized for me to explore the content that was printed on the card. That's highly targeted marketing that's a cross between the capabilities of custom print and online technologies. This is the key to driving publishing today, be it in print or online.
I do think especially that print-oriented publishers are missing many opportunities to develop custom markets for print as they fret about how to protect existing mass distribution models. Why focus on dwindling margins on rights-protected content when you can help people to add value to printable materials by opening up printable content to customization by partners and individuals? People can talk about eInk, tablets and other electronic display all they want, but cost-effective custom print is going to be a key factor in the renaissance of print publishing over the next several years. This rebirth may not result in an industry as we know it today, but it will still offer a very powerful value-add channel for most publishers.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: The Post-Search World
Moderator: Fernando Pereira, Research Director, Google Panelists:
Amiad Solomon, CEO, Peer39 Chris Lamb, SVP Alliances, the OpenCalais Initiative, Thomson Reuters Nancy Harvey, Executive Director, Wolfram Research Inc. Paul Martino , CEO and Co-founder, Aggregate Knowledge
Pereira kicked off the panel by asking panelists to give a very brief statement of the problem with search as it stands today and how it can or should be "fixed" for users and enterprises. Chris Lamb of Thomson Reuters gave an OpenCalais perspective, seeing the "bounce" effect of people completing one search and then returning to initiate another search, resulting in getting data but not necessarily a lot of information. The OpenCalais linked data cloud of links will help people to traverse content more easily than in typical search engine-driven information retrieval. Amiad Solomon of Pier39 focuses on search applications sees the post-search world focusing a lot more on monetizing content once people land on pages, providing different data layers for specific types of people engaging content. Nancy Harvey of Wolfram Research focuses on eliminating search inefficiencies by making fact retrieval more accurate and natural. A "clean" database of information has a natural language query interface on top of it that returns results "in a visually stunning way." She sees them co-existing with traditional search, providing specific answers to specific questions. Paul Martino of Aggregate Knowledge gave the analogy of seeing an ad for a television show that he watches appearing in Times Square alerting him to a new season of episodes. Being able to deliver information focused on interests without having to express those interests explicitly is key to the post-search world in his mind.
FP: Search does not have to be very good because users are very good filters, which makes search a fairly "forgiving" tool. But how do you deal with the risk of mistakes when people get the wrong results?
PM: Not a semantic person, Google AdSense gets it wrong a lot of the time, does a passive read of the page, meaning oftentimes inappropriate results. But it can be mitigated with whitelists, blacklists and so on, but ultimately the user doesn't get mad typically. The question from his perspective is how to deal with brand safety issues.
NH: Have to watch out for "artificial stupidity" in search results. For example, a search "what was the weather on Valentine's Day last year" may return different results for different locations or try to disambiguate before answering (for example, "Did you mean San Francisco in California"). They also manage this by steering away from domains that they don't understand. But the number of times that they need to do this is declining.
AS: Look at it from the advertising perspective, all major brands are saying that they don't want to be next to the wrong message, have to know how ad servers work, but takes sophistication. If there's an airline disaster, you need to be sensitive to avoid mismatches.
CL: Dealing with a more constrained group of users, optimized for business content, enables them to do a better job for that domain. But there are still domain issues, such as the term "The Fed" meaning the federal government in Australia and referring to the Federal Reserve in the U.S.
PM: Histograms of information on why an ad was displayed - nobody was clicking on them. Most people didn't even know that it was there. Sites with recommendations may be more important to them, people, content and ads are all of the same type, what's the best match across these lines, the user sees it all as potentially useful content.
CL: OpenCalais does disambiguation, offers a way to get into the linked data world, disambiguating offers a way to match content to content in meaningful ways. For example a press release may offers an Apple story and links to company information, not the fruit. This means a fundamental change to the surfing experience, over time there will be an increasing demand to match content to content.
AS: Need to understand the creative itself, look at the description (I would add, also look at the graphics for familiar patterns)
FP: With this melding of ads and content and content-to-content matching, it becomes a blurred editorial experience for users. How can this be managed?
PM: If ads are scored higher than content for a particular user, but sometimes when the best content is the ad the social contract is difficult to implement only with "sponsored content" labels.
FP: One school of thought tends to go for a statistical approach to infer relevance for content and ads. Some come from a semantic approach.
CL: They do use both natural language processing tools powered by a tech staff of about 40 people developing rules and coding.
AS: Mostly machine learning
NH: W/A is "intensely hand-crafted," engage world-class experts (comment: not scalable, not sure what business model this gives them ultimately)
PM: A semantic approach overall, used OpenCalais to build semantic maps internally to determine and test their weighting, try to treat all data sets the same and adjust weights objectively.
A good panel, was a little frustrating trying to blog this, as it covered a lot of ground, but I found it interesting. What seemed to be brushed over were the full impact of search on editorial operations as well as ad operations. I think that Paul Martino tuned in to one of the key "post-search" issues, namely the ability of search tools to build content that will have both editorial and sponsored "slots" that may appeal to different audiences on different levels. This sponsorship is thought of today mostly in terms of traditional media ads, but it is going to work its way into the enterprise space as well. How do suppliers and clients gain the attention of organizations, and how do publishers enable companies to provide factual content through their channels to enterprises on a sponsored basis? These are opportunities for search technologies to ponder. Ultimately search tools may frustrate traditional publishers, as it seems like a different language that's creating content value, but these technologies are creating opportunities for relationships between audiences and content producers that are becoming increasingly sophisticated.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: Ken Auletta on Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It
Author Ken Auletta recounted a discussion with Bill Gates back in the 1990s when the former Microsoft CEO noted that his greatest fear was someone in a garage developing a new technology that could surprise him. Many years later, here we are, Googled around the world. The global aspect of Google is perhaps one of the key factors in its disruption, enabling people to use their Google searches as their default textbooks on the world. But Ken's focus on Google as not just a world changer but a media-changer is a key factor in his outlook on the company. In an interview with Larry Page and Sergei Brin, he noted that he thought that he would like Google to become the first $100 billion media company - twice as large as the largest one today. Their banknote down on this bet? The trust of its worldwide users, which they provide with accuracy, neutrality and speed - attributes that are not strangers to publishers through the years, but reframed through the profitability of its ad networks tailored to cost-competitive ads. Most importantly, the $20-plus billion that Google makes in ad revenues, more than all TV ads in the U.S., has been forged in 11 years based on democratic access to these services. The democratization of content, you might say, has been build on a platform of democratizing marketing.
Auletta noted that Google's approach to solving problems is key to their success. Early on, they recognized that what my people were calling "information" was in fact a media business. They rather denied that early on in their investor and media statements, of course, but as they have had more of an indisputable position in media they are less shy about using the "M" word. Auletta related a story of an ad salesperson trying to sell SuperBowl TV ads to Google, and Google couldn't figure out why they would want to buy something that had such poor metrics. Google may be "messing with the magic" of advertising, but in an online world based on trusted relationships rather than seduction, the mascara running off of the face of the old magic was inevitable.
Google's strength, Auletta noted, was also in the "why not" factor in looking at opportunities in the content industry, such as with its news search engine and book scanning project, concepts that came out of Google's commitment to allowing employees to spend 20 percent of their time working on new "why not" ideas for content products and services. Why not cloud computing services, why not Android, why not...well, you get the picture. In the meantime, Auletta notes, media companies were "blind," investing lightly in digital technologies early on. In an interview with Intel's Andy Grove, Grove noted that a company has to plant their flag on the moon and stay there, assuming that you'll get some benefits. He believes that media companies also erred by placing engineers were down in the belly of most media companies, not near the top of typical media organizations. Instead, they farmed out technologies to companies like IBM and Microsoft.
Do you sacrifice your existing business for a "may be" business? Often, Auletta said, media companies were unwilling to take the big risk on new opportunities. In the short run, he sees that Google is doing great things for people, lowering the cost of advertising and information access for the average person. In the long run, though, he notes that if news becomes a free or very cheap commodity, the question becomes how talent rises to the top through the recognition offered by major media organizations. Thinking about the great expense of a typical TV episode, usually around $6-8 million, user-generated content from outlets such as YouTube is not anywhere near that level. Even Google recognizes that they need more professionally-produced content, knowing in part that ads cannot be their only major source of revenues from content. This came to light fairly recently in Auletta's interviews with Google's executives, coming in part in light of the economic downturn. Auletta sees more of a push by Google to enable paid content, with metered approaches, "firewalls" and so on.
Even Google has to fight the commoditization battle, Auletta observes. A stat he mentions; the average reader on nytimes.com spends 30 minutes a month on the site, versus the average reader of the paper edition spending 30 minutes a day engaged with their content. The battle is necessary, but not easy. Auletta sees the Googles of the world and traditional media companies coming together to try to build ways that can "save" them. But in his interviews with Google's leaders they revealed that they knew that it was important for Google to allow traditional media outlets to be independent, a factor highlighted by recent issues with government involvement with content distribution in China.
When will the unique leaders of Google move on to other things? Auletta observes that Schmidt and Brin have sold off some stock lately, perhaps to enjoy life, but it does raise the question of what happens to Google in the long run. Thinking of the inefficiencies of search engines and the personal efficiencies of social media, Auletta wonders whether there may be a connection here. "They don't know how to manage emotional intelligence," he said, relaying a story about Brin asking why he wouldn't publish the book for free on the Web. Auletta responded, would you ask a teacher to work for nothing? Who would pay him to come out to speak to them? Who would edit it and market it? Brin changed the subject quickly. Auletta saw this as an instinctual attitude towards copyright. I am not sure that I agree with him on this point, I think that it's more of an instance of what happens when that "engineer in the boiler room" makes it to the C-suite. Technical people have different attitudes, and that's generally neither right or wrong, good or evil.
If, as Auletta notes, even people in Silicon Valley see the Internet as the most disruptive technology the world has ever seen, then you have to confront the speed of change. It took 70 years for electricity to reach half of the U.S. people; it took the Web 9 years to reach half of the people in the U.S., and only five years for Facebook. "It should scare the s**t out of you," says Auletta. From my own perspective as the author of Content Nation, I am not scared at all. I say this from the perspective of someone who used to work at Bell Laboratories in an era in which major corporations invested heavily in new technologies to feed their futures. Companies that invest in the future help economies; companies that milk the present steal from our futures. While the winners in today's publishing world may not benefit from everything that Google has done, the average person in a village or in a flat in a major city in a developing nation has far more to gain from Google's right-brain approach to publishing. Thinking back to comments on Galileo from Elsevier's Hansen at the opening of this conference, I can't think of a time when scroll publishers were wanting to burn printing press developers at the stake. Technology is a medium, not a social or economic threat in and of itself.
I think that Auletta is a great journalist, and he's done an excellent job of helping us to gain insights into Google's inner thinking. However, there is ultimately in his outlook the elitism that has lead to the publishing industry's very vulnerability to Google's strengths. In a Q&A I asked him about the concept he raised about having an engineer at the right hand of a media company's CEO as a desirable idea. But he couldn't quite accept the idea of it being okay for that engineer to be the head of that company. There is a "they" aspect to Auletta's outlook that is, ultimately, not shared by the 3-plus billion people using the Web and mobile services to consume and publish content via Google and other services. Should people be afraid when the world becomes a nation of publishers? Perhaps so, in the sense that the changes put in motion by Content Nation are definitely shifting bases of power globally. But if the world as a whole gains more power through more people being more efficient and effective publishers, then the ultimate shift in publishing's power base to a wide global base of empowered publishers, including professional publishers, then the world as a whole is going to benefit doubtlessly. The media houses of New York nearby this conference are not likely to resemble the empty factories of my New England childhood any time soon, but understanding what being "Googled" is all about will be necessary to prevent that from happening. Thanks, Ken, a great presentation.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: Google's View on Ad Technologies In The Content Mix
When Google acquired DoubleClick, one of the assets that came over was Ari Paparo, who now serves as a Product Management Director focused on ad services. Ari was introduced and interviewed by David Sidman, Founder & Chairman of Linkstorm. Ari noted that 100 percent of ad agency holding companies are developing demand-side platforms, with 72 percent of Ad Exchange volume leveraging retargeting and 24 percent now regularly using behavioral targeting. Ari also noted that today's ad model is like a mutual fund, but that we're moving towards a "day trading" like model for ad buys, with more precise tactical acquisitions.l Research from Google is indicating that digital media is 50 percent less efficient versus other media in terms of overhead dollar spent, with 28 percent of video buyers noting that workflow efficiency a key issue holding back online video ad spends and 43 percent of U.S. marketing execs agreeing that brand measurement is holding back the growth of online marketing. So although the eyes are all turning to online content, the ad industry is still in its infancy in understanding how to compel audiences in online environments efficiently, even though online portals are getting to be more efficient in tracing an audience's footpaths.
The question becomes, though, when is an ad slot something more than a pork belly-like commodity? The premium value comes in when you can show that you can do something special in online environments. Sometimes that's "wow factor" via videos and online animated graphics, but Ari notes that in general the high-end creative approach works best when it's intense and impactful. Ari provided an example of a Harley Davidson campaign keyed to Veterans Day that enabled people to send tributes to troops overseas - combining altruism with sex appeal as a path to branding via a different approach. He notes that video is expected to be 15 percent of online spend in the next few years, but the efficiency factor is not encouraging. Getting overnight delivery of creative material and other basic logistics need to be overcome to make video a cost-effective choice, but in the meantime it's good groundwork that's needed to build expertise.
Data enrichment is key for effective ads also, such as data on specific real estate listings instead of just a generic ad for a realtor. Packaging for categories of users instead of categories of content is key also, enabling advertisers to target effectively to people who may be looking at more cost-effective ad inventory available in sections such a religion-oriented portion of a newspaper site. This can enable an ad sales force to raise their inventory up from "remnant" status to inventory that can be packaged more effectively for specific marketing targets.
David keyed off his questioning with a probe on paywalls; is paid content or ad-supported content going to pay the bills? Ari sees no one answer, but he sees it vitally important to segment effectively before you make decisions on what gets thrown behind a paywall. David notes that the ad side has the granular data, which can help publishers to make these kinds of decisions. However, Ari notes that publishers have lots of data that shows how site visitors move through a site. "There are gray areas," he notes, such as who is allowed to use cookie-derived data. Or, when someone buys something, would that site be allowed to advertise sporting goods based on what they have learned from inbound data? He recommends that publishers monitor their data and metadata rights carefully to control these kinds of opportunities carefully. The big mistake is to divide up inventories and missing the opportunity for in-depth understanding and analysis of data related to users. Publishers are now starting to monetize their on-site data off-site, renting lists to marketing and online services - an old business made new.
David and the audience probed on a few fronts in his questions for Ari:
The benefits of content management and categorization tools to improve ad revenues, but Ari notes that much of the potential for these types of technologies has been realized already.
On premium ad units, the cost-benefits of rich media are focused mostly now on super-premium brand advertisers, who do get some value as they connect to consumers. But down the value chain to typical retailers, Ari notes that it's not clear that rich media makes the cash registers ring.
On semantic processing in ad placement, Ari was not forthcoming in detail, but he noted that some smaller vendors are working with focusing terminology. He hasn't seen that semantic technologies have brought that much to the table yet.
On the ComScore panel/cookie hybrid measurement model, in which publishers are being charged for being ranked, he thinks that the panel approach is useful
Agencies are having to step up their technology commitments in a big way, they are trying to adapt rapidly, he things that they are adaptable and will be around in the excxhange-oriented future of ads
Mobile markets: advertisers are frustrated but very excited about mobile, formats and measurement still in its early days
Ari gave a great presentation, but the larger question does seem to be what marketers need to do in general to extract the most efficiency out of online advertising. Certainly improved data, audience analysis and measurement and better ad production techniques can be important advances. However, to some degree marketing itself is changing in the face of a Web that finds people spending a huge amount of time online in social media services that encourage one-to-one exchanges. Managing millions of individual personal selling relationships online is a far cry from managing CPMs. So although there is more efficiency coming in ad networks, the broader question of how companies like Google can help companies to measure success with online marketing is still a work in its early progress.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010 Previews: Parse.ly, Automatically Recommended Content
Parsely, a semantic tool that recommends content, steers users towards content towards personalization and recommendation through their licensed content. When and how personalization really happen? A WSJ editor thought that it wouldn't be available until 2015, but Sachin Kamdar, Chief Executive Officer of Parse.ly, claims that it's here today. Parse.ly collects a little personal interest information from users, "listens" to their content habits and provides recommendations that can be embedded in any number of content applications. Market segmentation data and other demographics fall out of this information naturally. Parse.ly is available to publishers now for integration via their new P3 platform. I can't say that I haven't seen a few of these types of these plays, but it's a type of technology that seems well positioned to be just that - a technology play that is not trying to out-do publishers that can benefit from its capabilities.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010 Previews: DeepDyve, A NetFlix for Research
DeepDyve's clients are typically non-traditional research users in small to medium businesses as well as non-institutional users, a market that DeepDyve CEO William Park sees as a $2-4 billion industry. Instead of chasing these users to "pirated" research content, non-institutional users and users in major institutions without access to specific collections can get a read-only view of scientific and technical research for 24 hours on a "rent-to-own" basis if it's premium content, or longer use models, including links for unlimited use and publication subscriptions. Revenues are split 50-50 with their partners, who see it mostly as found money, since it's going for a community not typically targeted by their institutional sales forces. "It's better to get half of something than all of nothing," a DeepDyve partner noted, the "something" in this case being about an 8 percent conversion rate into sales from initial exposure in search views via DeepDyve. This is a model that readily extended to content beyond the scientific, technical and medical community, of course, which is an opportunity that is likely to be a focus of DeepDyve moving forward. This is a good model for publishers that need to market their content effectively to Web-honed users not attached to enterprise subscriptions. I expect it to do well.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010 Preview: Boardroom Insiders
Boardroom Insiders' Principal and Founder's Sharon Gillenwater, highlighted this new service that is a database of corporate boardroom biographies and backgrounds, built around people who are not your typical high-profile CEOs. What these people do, however, is publish content on the Web, and Boardroom Insiders goes through social media sources and other sources to glean information about who they are personally and professionally. There are about 100,000 records in teh Boardroom Insiders database, and with a lot of human input to make these more than inch-deep records it will limit the overall scope of this product. She sees the competition not as Hoover's, Jigsaw and other online information providers but the people who are trying to find this information on their own via the Web. Sales are both on the per-profile and enterprise basis, so it's a good mix of revenues to support this specialized service. This seems like a potential strong offering, similar to the original Reuters business of closing a telegraph line gap with carrier pigeons carrying messages. Human input and insight can apply semantics for hard-to-mine information very well at this scale, but it will be an ongoing race to apply those resources ahead of improving semantic technologies and social media services. The response will be, hopefully, that Boardroom Insiders keeps ahead of that curve continually by incorporating these types of capabilities.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: Elsevier's Hansen Lays Out How to Take On Risks in SciTech Markets
Elsevier Health Sciences CEO Michael Hansen laid out an argument for major enterprise publishers surviving and thriving in tough economic times by starting with a parable about Elsevier's roots as the publisher that helped Galileo to get his then-controversial scientific works in print. At a time when many of the status quo gatekeepers were dead set against Galileo's theories, a publisher helped to change the world as we know it today. Flash forward to today, in a world in which people are often paralyzed by the pace of change in scientific publishing and trying to understand where to bring their organizations to deliver both profits and growing markets. For Hansen, this means in the short term helping clients to cut costs by consolidating services through Elsevier's content integration capabilities, as well as being more bold in delivering services to clinical settings.
The clinical opportunity is particularly important, given the inefficiencies that exist in the delivery of medical services and the limited resources that the typical patient has at their disposal. Hansen highlighted that the typical doctor in the U.S. has about six minutes of contact with a patient in a typical visit - an almost real-time window in which to make decisions about health care. No small surprise, then, that Hansen underscored the fact that only about 30 percent of people in the U.S. are actually getting proscribed treatments for their medical problems. This means, of course, that you're dealing with a type of content user that has not been the target of Elsevier services typically, one that has risks that your typical publisher's legal department will be wary to take on. As a questioner noted after Hansen's speech, there is also the question of who will be willing to pay for clinically-oriented services. But when you think of the number of questions that need to be answered on a given day, there are more potential points of interaction in clinical settings than typical research environments overall.
Hansen noted that the sales force incentives at Elsevier has been tuned to meet with some of this shift, but it's also a major shift to get products and strategy in line with what is in essence a real-time content integration strategy. For example, Elsevier has launched PageBurst, a platform that helps nurses and others in clinical settings to get access to critical medical information, a platform that Elsevier uses for their own content but is open to all kinds of content, including content from competitors. This underscores an emerging theme in enterprise content of many sectors embracing the content integration strategies that Wall Street publishers embraced decades ago to fight the commoditization of their content. It's a strategy that's not without its risks and revenue exposures, but necessary if scientific publishers are to improve their long-term outlook. Thanks to Michael for a great kickoff talk, getting to the heart of what major enterprise publishers must embrace to succeed in a time when "heresies" in STM publishing are becoming the new order of things quite rapidly.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009 - End Keynote: Stephanie George, EVP, Time, Inc.
Up-front editorial comment: I am familiar with a number of things that Time, Inc. is doing, they're really aggressive on many fronts to leverage their brands to the max online. Does that mean that these efforts will support their current valuation, management and cost structure? That's a different question. Look at Time within the framework of major media companies trying to find a path to the future by being all about brands from the bottom up. It's the right approach.
In every dark cloud there's a silver lining, continuing to evolve the business. Pages down 11.7 percent 2008, 2009 is looking worse, that's good news for us, because we're more than a magazine. Mergers such as CNN Money, one of the world's largest content companies, live in mags, books, online, mobile and more. Our trusted brand content is world-renowned. Strong multi-platform brands, RealSimple was conceived as a brand, not a magazine, promise is a life made easier. Product lines at Target stores. SI.com, the Vault with SI classic photos. Essence, with Warner Brothers launched the new Essence.com, the weekend of July 4th will have Beyonce at the Essence music festival. Nobody is better at telling multiplatform storytelling than Time. Created Life in 1936, photojournalism was that era's storytelling with technology. Words "plane crash in the Hudson," images of passengers on the wing, Luce's original concept remains the same. There's still a beginning, a middle and and end, but not always in order. When we text votes to American Idol the platform changes the experience. Can the new media platforms change the story? Yes.
Look at the Life brand, in continuous publication since 1936. Weekly issues, special books, one of the most iconic brands. If you're Time, how do you leverage ten million photos that you own? More than 73 million people search images, growing faster than any other type of search. In the middle of a digital image revolution. For the most iconic brand, they launched the Life archive search engine on Google. More and more are being scanned, example of Marilyn Monroe is a benchmark of scanning progress. New Life.com is a joint venture with Getty Images, millions of images from the annals of history.
Remember how magazine sites used to look, everything repurposed from print? No more. Content lives differently on each platform. Instyle knows how people feel about their hair, people can "try on" celebrity hair, upload your photo and try away. Editors have become great short format storytellers. Fifty percent of all finance videos are viewed on CNN Money.com. Editoral specials have become huge live online events. The People brand is growing, the "power of People" has become multi-touch-point, interactive community. When J-Lo's twins were born, broke news on People.com, interviews with their editors on TV, mag did 2 million copies, stories on People Espanol. One story equalled 133 million media impressions. Surround the story. Mia Farrow special issue is now a megabrand in its own way. People digital has several brands and skins. People Digital grew bottom line 48 percent. 2007 was 18 percent. Company overall bottom line now represents 10 percent of revenues of Time Inc., many of most profitable titles are online. (COMMENT: Yes, it's low compared to some B2B brands, but think of how quickly they've gotten back into the game). Users spend average 19 minutes on their sites.
We're a content company that makes great magazines. People who had their mags taken away for two weeks really wanted them back. Asked if they wanted them without ads, they said no, they wanted the experience (COMMENT: Lesson for online advertisers, you need to take more care to make your content a part of a person's online experience). Cosmopolitan, brand is getting hotter with younger people. Time's commemorative election issue sold five times more than normal issue. Mags overall up four percent for Time.
How to weather the storm? 1. Thow away your five-year plans. Look out two years at most, be nimble, stratgegy can be successful only when conditions are well understood. What worked today is not necessarily going to work tomorrow. Re-strategized, made three business units. Going to market more strategically, have bigger strategic discussions with clients. 2. Become true partners with your clients. Need to understand their businesses inside and out, have to come with full solutions (COMMENT: This is a long-term trend, ad shops are being trumped oftentimes by well-positioned brands such as Time, Inc.). Clients will remember who was in the foxhole with them when times were bad. 3. Collaborate. Take advantage of collaborative opportunities inside company. Lehman Brothers, a tenant in their building, came crashing down, Fortune magazine writers were chosen to cover it for Time. 4. Don't sweat the small stuff. Focus on mission-critical business issues, focus on what will win business and build the brand. 5. Trusted branded content matters. Branded journalism will take on an increasingly important role (COMMENT: True, but don't underestimate the power of personal social media brands. 6. Be optimistic. Bring a "can-do" spirit to the challenges.
Excellent address, great case studies, fun presentation. Good stuff, but darn, do big media companies need micropayments.
Question from audience - how do you handle much lower online ad rates? A: If anyone thinks online digital revenues are going to make up falling print revenues, they're not getting it. Need to say to clients that they need each other, they need to keep each other from going out of business, going with collaborative solutions to clients, sometimes even basic merchandizing and bundling assets for them. We're helping them now and come back when times are better with fresh new ideas and new economic models.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009: CTO to the Stars! The Shifting Role of CTOs
Moderator: Patrick J. Spain, Chairman & CEO, Newser LLC
Panelists: Michael Angle, Co-Founder, President and CTO, Alacra, Inc. Christos Moschiovitis, CEO, tmg-emedia.com Martin Howard, Executive Directors, Transaction Advisory Services, Ernst & Young LLP
Martin: Traditionally CTO was part of management team, CTO would report to CIO. CIO was more business-oriented, but now it's strategic, responsible for I.T. function, more and more has that CTO function, more heads. Still see some confusion in those roles, one may be called the other, titles in flux. Michael: In my case a COO, my CEO introduces me as the person in charge of everything that plugs in. For our business is incredibly important to the success of our business, not just about accounting and back-office big iron. Unlike top sales person, etc., they have their own domains of expertise, what I do spans all of those functions in the company, help to develop new products, influence how sales does there job, influence how we do social media Christos: Looking at a transformation in the media industry, CEOs and visionaries trying to figure out the appopriate roles, the marriage between CEOs and the technology function being worked out. Starting to see the ascention at the CEO level that have substantial ownership and understanding of the technology function (COMMENT: Hmm, just like Silicon Valley has done for decades. Amazing. We're finally getting past the post World War II MBA management phenomenon and back to people who want to make products and services work).
Patrick: "Insurmountable Opportunities," what are you embracing willingly and unwillingly.
Michael: Cutbacks with "X" in the double digits, how can we help clients do that. I need to be a part of that charge, leading it if possible instead of following it. Have to have statistics on the ROI of content and services within client organizations. Unglamorous stuff, but you have to build cost control and measurement into the product. Martin: ROI has to be on a business strategy basis as well as a cost basis. Organizations are asking CTOs and CIOs to be more strategic. Where are the very best places to spend to mitigate risk. Christos: You bring to the table more than just technology but innovation as well, may not be an apparent savings at first. As technology has increased the size of organizations, more focus on profits and what it all means. We are seeing tremendous growth in our practice because of this reason, looking at what is most cost-effective way to bring in expertise. In each different are there are different value points. ROI is the governing driver. Martin: Execution is also incredibly important.
Patrick: Issue of "fair use," has technology made the issue of fair use more challenging, are you more aware of what your technology can and should use? Michael: Monitor for "bots" and scrapers, have automatic shutoff mechanisms. Sometimes you want to get scraped for business opportunities, but not every opportunity is helpful. Have to look at how it's being used. Martin: It's a key factor for due diligence, for integration and acquisition intellectual property protection comes in very strongly. The law hasn't caught up in a neat way yet, but investors are struggling with the issues when they look at acquiring content companies. Deals can fall apart when internal protections were seen as inadequate or when the threat of its inventors walking away from the company scared off investors.
Patrick: More people contributing content, how does this impact I.T.? Christos: First on copyright. Obviously the issue of copyright is very complex, involves legislation. If you look at it over the period of the last fifteen years, people have been running for the hills. Content has enormous value. People are doing extremely bizarre things to monetize content, yet people put it up for free to get the eyeballs. How do you think that we're going to protect it? NYT was wrong, if I go to a newsstand with the NYT, all I can do is to read the headlines (COMMENT: again, micropayments can help with this). The issue of IP protection is linked to this problem. Martin: Content is still king, but that doesn't mean that content has to be turned by professionals. Bloggers have had a huge impact, most bloggers make money indirectly. Wikipedia hasn't put Britannica out of business but they've had to change. People aren't buying papers because they're reading Google News, good enough and free. For news, maybe that's better, reporters can be controlled. Some times people want to pay for access to the analyst for expertise. Christos: We need to talk about the problems of the business models in a very fundamental way, the pink elephant is that the model is changing, we're going to face the came changes as the music industry has faced. Verizon is in a sweet spot, they own the last mile of connectivity, how do you translate that into the media business? Verizon "owns" Manhattan (COMMENT: well, not on an enterprise level), how does that translate into a media level? "It will go away after I am no longer president". It will always be the next generation's problem; well the next generation is here. Martin: There is no problem with content, more than ever before, reading more than ever before, a simple problem of companies trying to make money the old-fashioned way.
Patrick: At HighBeam we created a mobile application, didn't make a penny off of it. Mobile has had such great promise, is mobile the new CD-ROM that will be surpassed, are we waiting for a good way to deliver ads? Michael: In finance mobile is very real, many professionals have given up their desktop, how do I deliver information on a screen three inches square, how do you pull out the meaningful chunks. Need to get content on Facebook, have to look if it's appropriate to get messages on Twitter. Martin: The technologies and methods of delivery is coming along, coming to a world where each person will have their own intranet (COMMENT: One of the more interesting comments at the conference. Compelling). Christos: Technology offers something that was not available a year or so ago: location awareness. Can provide very specific content. The world of science fiction is becoming fact rapidly. Happened earlier with instant messaging, it's not that it can deliver quick messages, it is that you aware that you are available. It knows when you've signed in. Your phone tells me where you are and when you are available. Mobile is very real and will dominate the space. Michael: Technologies solve the filtering and context problem, geolocation helps with that, but what if I am making a pitch to Xerox and want to close the deal? It's not so good for that specifically. For the user it's all about the filtering, for the provider it's about getting the right stuff to filter. Christos: Now we have technology where we can sell words (hover technologies) for advertising, when you have content that's sellable to the word, how does that affect editorial and sales? The two groups need to collaborate much more closely as a result. Editorial can no longer be in an ivory tower, they are now responsible for creating community around content.
Patrick: Video is entirely new to some in the audience, if you're a content creator and distributor, do you need video or can you live without it? Michael: Many sites include a video on the outside, more than a teaser, the thought of the day, accomodates how people see core information. Martin: Video's best for some things, words for others, as aggregators piece them together, not sure that providers have to be all things to all people. Christos: At the end of the day it's all about relevance, video is straightforward to produce. Can never be ignored, need to talk specifics, though.
Good panel, operational views are a challenge to present in a conference of this sort, I think that Patrick handled it very well and brought some really interesting contributors to the discussion. In Q&A, Michael Angle suggested in a tongue-in-cheek way that perhaps we need to fire everyone in I.T. over thirty. That sounds like a familiar refrain from my own youth, but with online media there's a strong ring of truth to it. The technology landscape is changing so quickly, you cannot afford to rest on your laurels on older views of how I.T. should be done and to hold back your organization. But in defense of more mature technologists, there are plenty of forward thinkers of all ages who are ready to rock with new publishing technologies.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009: Profiting from Video
Moderator: Nicholas Ascheim, VP, Product Management, NYTimes.com
Panelists: Sandy Malcolm, Executive Producer Video, CNN.com Andy Plesser, Producer and Founder, Beet.tv Kathy Yates, CEO, AllBusiness.com
Forecast was for a 1.35 billion market, was actually $587 million (eMarketer). Goalposts keep moving out but trends are promising. Number of people going up, Hulu up to 1.7 percent of all streams (COMMENT: that's better, but good..?).
Malcolm: Representing the content owner, cringe at Blodgett's comment about TiVos recording content. Our streaming service runs 24x7, podcasts, doing pretty well in video, in spite of tough times. Plesser: Been doing a video blog for three years, help decision-makers in digital industry, a virtual meeting for "snacking" on conversations of authoritative voices. Small staff, low costs, small degree of profitability, going well. Yates: For business owners, evergreen content, customers come to get smart quickly on topics outside of their domain expertise, 18 million of podcasts, webinars, video segments, video about 3,000 segments, also license content from other sources, including other video production units. Have invested quarter million dollars in video assets, operate on break-even with ads and sponsorhips.
Aschiem: What drove the decision to focus on video.
Plesser: Was in PR and ads for 20 years, clients want to get in video, took video camera and taped people and put it on the Web, on the blog. Evolving into a business slowly in a B2B model, Adobe and Akamai want to reach their audience. Niche publishing, lots of opportunities. Yates: Very nuts-and-bolts, like how to set up a LAN, handy if you don't have a CTO. Scaled video quickly based on feedback from customers, operate on a testing environment, look at which kind of segments drive the most usage. Malcolm: In video for years, 2002 started a subscription service, started us really thinking about the business, tried a pay firewall, tough to integrate, a perfect storm of events helped us to see that we could do a pay service for live video, upped the clips, built a digital ad sales team that could sell cross-platform. Took the free live service online last year, phenomenal growth.
Ascheim: How much does it cost really to produce video?
Malcolm: We can pick and choose what comes in to Atlanta, few restrictions, look at what works best for the Web, not everything that works for TV works for the Web. Have an editor pool, can pick from the best. Plesser: The cost of news gathering has changed, reporters send their videos from webcams to be edited, may edit Skype feed. It's not so much the cost as the access to the content. The cost structure has dropped for news gathering and production. Where you had to get big editing systems, now you can get final cut for a thousand dollars and you're good to go. This has become apparent to bigger news organizations. With High-Def, cost of streaming has dropped. We have an editor who works 20 hours a week, an assistant blogger any myself, sometimes ten original videos a week, 800 in archive, grab videos from CNN, again, costs are very low. Malcolm: Looking at Skype, we understand the value of keeping costs low. Moving away from bigger systems, taking advantage of easier, nimbler and cheaper systems. Yates: We benchmark production costs at about $250 per segment for 3-5 minute segments. Keep the same cost benchmark, have worked with providers who have developed video for long format, not really focused on what the Web needs, so in-house works better and helps to control costs.
Ascheim: I it mostly the size of your own library that drives traffic?
Yates: We're a long-tail site, so the more content that we have, the larger our audience. We've looked at this, the activity is driven by promotion, sensitive to how it's promoted to people landing on our site. Plesser: The whole notion of video search is very important, if you have a service about a video or product, put the metadata around it, or use blogging to get the data in the search engines, there's a huge opportinity to get videos in search engines in a big way. People aren't necessarily going to get into your show. Google is making video more discoverable via universal search. Malcolm: Opening more bureaus, we want to own as much original content as possible. We are not an open platform, you're concerned about where your content is going to end up, but you need to be smart about it, we have an embed player now. Plesser: If your content is of value and you want to make money from syndication, our ad travels in an embeddable player, so it's possible to play on a much larger field with an advertisting component. What's happening with the Web is that it's becoming more and more a television medium. We're watching video clips, video has to be a part of a site, demand is skyrocketing. Content creators are going to be in a position to get revenues from a licensing fee or revenue share. There's going to be a big demand. Malcolm: Our ad sales team is working on that now, you can stay on your site, get a high CPM, have to get out there in the marketplace, look closely at revshares.
Ascheim: Is the Web becoming a television medium
Yates: Not so much about what the editor wants as what the audience wants, ability to deliver video content is there now on broadband, the quality of the production is less important to the user than the producer. Obviously very low quality doesn't work, but the greatest value comes from the relevance of the information.
Ascheim: Longer form content, seems to be more demand today, perhaps because the experience is better, but most is in entertaiment. Is there a future for more as the format matures?
Malcolm: News is more disposable, shorter shelf life, long form is a little trickier, can do well, spots for that, live service has taken off, the amount of time that people spend increases, even if it is "snacking," you can get what you want, where you want it. Internet can also harvest live events. Plesser: It's about snacking now, can't do video online too long, as it becomes integrated into living rooms it will grow. Yates: For entertainment long form is growing, they watch all of their shows on the Web, annoying to find a second segment on Hulu and YouTube. A growing appetite for Webinars, people cutting back on business expenses, people watching them on the Web.
Ascheim: What models will sustain video? Yates: Will go to 2-3 percent, perhaps larger, as an audience, today all ad-based but we'll see other models and higher production quality at lower costs. Plesser: Watching video on PC will be irrelevant, a lot we'll see on mobile and in the living room, the notion of learning from and meeting people will be key, where video becomes a more interactive experience. Broadband and high bandwidth will allow video communication will become two-way. Will comfort people in the know to be in touch. Malcolm: Program for various mediums, community involvement is key, Facebook was successful beyond measure, 26 million live streams, complements TV. TV is that lean-back experience, you can do that and lots can do that, but the online experience was more intimate, Facebook comments were running as the videos were running, people were commenting all night, created a new community around live. Interaction and the ability to get involved is key, have to plan for all of them. Plesser: Live streaming is so easy now, not like in the old days where you needed a big professional crew. Bandwidth is really bad in the U.S. compared to other nations.
Excellent session, tightly managed, lots of key best practices. Can't ask for much more. The stats on the inauguration are compelling, that's a mass-scale audience for the feed and mass interaction at a community level. Models are still being worked out, but they follow logically from other social media/Web content.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009: Henry Blodgett, CEO, Business Insider
Silicon Alley Insider becoming Business Insider, TechCrunch model, 2 million readers, but facing same ad challenges as everyone else. Not a "lifecaster," but real journaism. Still, a new form of journalism is evolving. Old style is to take existing content and to throw it online, reading it online is great, but that's not the real form of online journalism looks like, with strengths and weaknesses.
Aggregation is the key to the new journalism, the very act of aggregation can be valuable. High-velocity production, more similar to broadcasting, like a "text broadcast" (COMMENT: read, "real-time." Again, Wall Street's real-time legacy comes into the online news world). Some say it's garbage, that it will all fail, but if you hear that Steve Jobs is sick you're going to check it out and see if it's credible. There are plenty of people who know that it's true, and it helps to get the truth out more quickly. A source said that there's going to be a massive layoff, in short order we got a lot more information that this was indeed going to happen. Access is great, but on the other hand, when employees contact you with information and emails, access is less important. A lot of the readers will know a lot more than a journalist will know.
People want "snackable" content, see what's happened in the last hour. He wrote an article for the Atlantic magazine, good topic, lots of readership, but nothing like the first Twitter of the video of the rescue of the plane that went down in the Hudson. Online journalism is taking sound, text, video, it's not one medium or another. Gawker pushes this furthest, has eight TiVos capturing shows where someone might say something interesting, then clipping it for online. It's different from MarketWatch and TheStreet.com, which were more online newspaper models.
Huffington Post bigger than the Boston Globe, they find the most interesting stories on the Web, it's cost-effective, which the Boston Globe is not. Gawker Media blog network was twice that of the LA Times. Total team: 80 people, LAT 800. Can't support that kind of newsroom with that kind of traffic, Nick Denton is way ahead. But still big problems, online readers think that everthing should be free. That has got to change, just not enough advertising. Ads haven't evolved, same little box ads, shouldn't have to mimic a newspaper (COMMENT: or a television). People complain nobody clicks on the ads, but we have done almost nothing to innovate. Advertisers only care about clicks, a great ad without a click is viewed as a failure, yet in print nobody clicks and people consider those ads successful.
But the problems are far worse for traditional media. Newspapers have had a great 200 year run, but now it's over. Disruptive technologies are not necessarily better, many products created with it are miles short of The New York Times, but it's cheaper and gradually it gets better. In the meantime the old technology pushes towards premium users with more expensive technology, pretty soon they're pushed out of the mass markets. Google is pushing Microsoft to the high end, won't stop Google's onslaught. The cost of producing online journalism is so much lower, HuffPo 20 editorial staff, Gawker only $15 million while NYT is $1+ billion, profits from lower costs are working. Craigslist is free, unlimited real estate, a lot of traditional publishing companies are hosed. But some do well, like Bloomberg, Dow Jones doing well, the NYT can be saved but will have to cut 40 percent of the cost and re-explore charging for online (COMMENT: yes, but not through the old models. Micropayments will be the way, we can pick up the New York Post for a quarter at the newsstand, micropayments will work if done neutrally).
Journalism is in great shape, will look different but it will be in great shape. There are vastly more journalists than ever before, experts can express their opinion online. Editors need to co through this, some are paid to be editors, others comment on others (COMMENT: or link to it in blogs, what Robin Good calls "Newsmasters." In today's world "Deep Throat" would have sent documents to "The Smoking Gun" and it would have all been online. Papers will continue to get hammered, some will adapt, many are already writing real-time, but they will survive (COMMENT: Maybe). Online journalism will continue to grow, some will build sustainable models, will develop more professional talent, will hire credible journalists, the only thing that will change is that the shareholders of existing companies will get hammered. Creating destruction will bring us to the better future.
COMMENT: Overall, completely spot on. This is the new role of media today, though I think that he underplays the role of on-site expertise, which is a definition that varies with events. For example, sometimes a lawyer or a stock analyst with a blog will be an on-site expert about events in their profession, other times a laborer in China who happens to be near the epicenter of a major earthquake who is equipped with Twitter will be the expert. Expertise is becoming more contextual, but the truth is always larger than a journalist. I do think that CQ's Bob Merry's outlook is closer to the greater truth - we've had journalism in its current form only for about two hundred years, it will continue to be a good profession in its own way but the aggregation of news is taking its place in many aspects, making insight from on-site facts more important.
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009: Thriving on Chaos: Profiting from the New New Era of Political, Economic and Technology Change
Moderator: Jim Kolleger, CEO, Genesys Partners, Inc.
Panelists: Dan'l Lewin, Corporate VP, Microsoft, and Head, Strategic and Emerging Business Development Neal Lipschutz, SVP and Managing Editor, Dow Jones Newswires Steve Lohr, Senior Writer and Technology Reporter, The New York Times Jon Miller, Founding Partner, Velocity Interactive Group, former CEO, AOL
Jim: Economy?
Steve: Federal Reserve was the lender of last resort, now the Federal government will be the spender of last resort, but it will be a targeted approach, not just shoveling potholes. Anti-trust needs to be watched, new appointee, worked on Netscape/MSFT deal, anti-competitive practices will be scrutinized.
Jon: Our consumer business means impact, as seen in our recent financials, as enterprises cut back economic impact is in the long run optimistic, scaling out of seamless computing is good, very powerful smart devices, blending content that's user-created is key.
Neal: As long as this downturn is going to be, it's hard to go back to what we had before boom times, technology growth and disruption will make some sectors like finance risk-averse, jobs creation is going to be key but it's easier said than done. Free enterprise will be less so than recently. Dan'l: EBITDAs aren't right, Ballmer's "reset" does not mean that they are going to go back to having companies trade at old levels.
(COMMENT: It's a shame that easy money propped up the valuation of fundamentally weak publishing properties for the past several years. This kept smart money from being spent more effectively on needed transformation in the industry. That doesn't mean that a good part of that transformation hasn't happened, it's just that so much investment was thrown at failing models.)
Neal: America is going to be less important now, opportunities may be greater outside of the U.S.
Steve Lohr: Isn't it amazing how the world fell off the cliff September 15th?
Jim: Money velocity has driven information velocity, will old media dollars be even digital dimes? "A new normal."
Steve: NYT approach is to double down, selling off portion of building, hope is that you can swim to the other shore. Online model that was supposed to help change from print is changing radically.
Neal: Business models will have to rely on quality content and subscription revenues.
Steve: Can the genie go back in the bottle once everyone decided to give it away?
Dan'l: Big believer in news business, not necessarily the newsPAPER business. News is proliferating, consumption never higher, I use 20-30 sources, many do. What model to get from there to there is not known, not supporting things now. The genie does not go back in the bottle.
Jim: Political change, were you suprised about going from X-Box to Atari in White House technology?
Dan'l: They think that digital can have a big impact on recovery plan, it's a question of how you go about it.
Jim: The tools of the teenager are now in the White House (COMMENT: Gentle jab, Jim, the teenagers grew up. It's young adults, now, that are driving social media growth). Organization for America, can be a force for good, but can ricochet, microscripts may embed themselves.
Steve: Obama admin message has been top-down and consistent, stuck with message, no panic when Hillary won in PA primary, in that sense very elitist. (COMMENT: It's different in social media, not a mater of polling strangers but of listening to people with whom you have relationship).
Jon: The polling methods of McCain who was going with where the wind blew showed through.
Jim: 37 billion of stimulus coming.
Steve: Health IT was 20 billion, broadband was 6, broadband will increase. Will not just throw money at things, pay per performance with metrics will rule. We've done this on a small scale so far, will be interesting to see where it goes.
(COMMENT: Interesting to see how this year's panel is really not about gadgets, as has been Jim's usual focus. It's now about what the technologies have done to change society. See "Content Nation" for more).
Jon: Now a matter of public discussion and policy to make more open and avialable content happening.
Jim: Other technology trends impacted by these issues?
Jon: Broadband is a big deal, more recent countries coming online have more, we're falling behind.
Neal: Some major cities will not have major newspapers in print, the trend will accelerate. If the downturn is longer, the trends will accelerate.
Dan'l: Fundamental trends, end of Moore's law, virtualization is starting to happen, lot of infrastrucutre going on, action in conversations at this conference is at the application level, but the data is where there's a lot of action. CIOs looking at where they will balance their infrastructure, where will the storage be, where will the backup be. New markets forming in education, global markets where infrastructure is growing. Won't see a pause. Robotics is hot, vision, spatial, voice interfaces, all of these are evolving rapidly.
Neal: The value of content will be there no matter what the technology, delivery mechanisms will change, but targeted content still valuable, though it may not include general news.
Jim: Always a new wrinkle, what's the new wrinkle?
Jon: Most recent is video and social networking on Web, before that Yahoo and AOL, goes in four-year waves, things do change. But the stuff that rises to the top isn't every day. The industry will continue to re-create itself over time, it's not the thousand little things. (COMMENT: Disagree. Reference the Museum of Modern Betas, where there are more than 4,000 new social media tools in four years. It's the little and the big and the little that become huge).
Jim: Huge changes for the industry?
Jon: iPhone was a huge change, most revolutionary was inclusion of Safari browser in iPhone (COMMENT: Agreed, the platform will be forgotten eventually, the Web will not be forgotten).
Jim: Where does workflow fit in?
Dan'l: Where you are is becoming increasingly important, your location and context is key, what comes to you is key, location-based services are growing, those kinds of services will surface soon. Notion of location in the cloud that's yours that synchronizes with friends' devices is being investigated at Microsoft, social networking is a little out of control, is it mostly noise.
Jon: Speaking up for consumer side, at end of 2008, consumer usage of Internet surpassed enterprise usage for first time (COMMENT: The world is indeed a nation of publishers!). Consumer applications are driving much of the Web use, that will work its way back.
Steve: Where would you invest?
Jon: As a consumer-oriented business, my whole thing is what the consumer is doing. Closed on sale of Expedia from Microsoft, over 3 billion, bad week, dot-com crash ended travel, no precedents, Barry Diller said will consumers continue to travel in the future, and if so will they do more of it using online tools. Video consumption is taking off, makes perfect sense as it is. On a worldwide basis, video consumption is still early days.
Jim: Jon, you ran AOL, how do you see online game playing out?
Jon: Two big trends, consolidation and breakups, content and distribution breaking up (COMMENT: Agreed, but depends in some sectors on availability of monetization tools).
Jim: If you're a company, what do you keep your eyes on, where are the opportunities?
Dan'l: Paying attention to lots of stuff, my particualr interest is to look at entrepreneurial activity and where the money goes to support them. Pragmatic answer as to how they help them. A pretty good bead on that side of global innovation. Larger concerns are there for acquisition, too. You'll see more of the same.
Jon: Mentioned video earlier, what are people doing in mobile environments, need to understand usage contours. iPhone apps, haven't yet understood behaviors, will be profound in a lot of ways.
Steve: iPhone was not an original idea, why couldn't Microsoft do it?
Dan'l: We should have, we'll play catch up. Microsoft is a "hundred flowers bloom" approach to platform, not the tight store and service integration of Apple, historically.
Great panel as always, high-level discussions like this are not always productive but Jim manages to keep them well-focused.
