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

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

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

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

Labels: Buying and Selling eContent, events, Patrick Spain

Jerome Bland-Sebrien, FT.com: how to take advantage of video. Video is exploding, similar to TV experience, offers higher click-through rates than other online formats. FT has access to business leaders and top CEOs, can interview them, get exciting responses. [COMMENT: Good leverage of their social network, an important differentiator - for now. As social media builds, will this be a strong differentiator? Perhaps less so.] Clip with typical professional production values, interview with Eric Schmidt. Having done these, why is this going to be unique? Schmidt talks about video, nothing really new. It's a captive game, everyone has too much to lose to slip up greatly. What happens (and has already happened in some Silicon Valley instances) when the CEOs post their own clips and conversations?

Tom Cintorino, PennWell. Mostly ads with some paid content. Showing the evolution of a product from early Web days onward and the revolution to their organization in the process. Building up the troops, still many "traditionalites," but moving forward. "Buy-in" scales, looking for 75 percent buy-in, 100 percent digital group, 50 percent audience (some have to support it), 50 percent revenue source. 2001, Webcast introduced. SOLD their first Webcast 2005 - operating group wasn't bought in. 2006 video, 50 percent buy-in from operations, operating group was "telling" them that static slides weren't very engaging. Podcasts also, hit benchmarks for success. 2007: Simulation project, 100 percent support from operations and digital media, added interactive control, embedded ad opportunities. Bottom line, multimedia is allowing B2B channels to create their own "cable" channel equivalents only much better, because the audience can queue up content for editors to review. Current comes to B2B! But operations starts getting a little glazed, need to be brought along. Amazing how progressive this is.

Daniel Harrison, ConsumerReports.org - shoots a video for YouTube from the podium. It says it all. Local culture wasn't reacting too well to user input, funny video of a helmet "tester" crashing into a wall, worried about biased results and the impact on the editorial brand. Didn't want to repeat the L.A. times Wiki editorial process. "Design transmits a lot of data" - the venue, the context, is part of what makes it content (see our Wikipedia definition of content - top one). Tried to focus on the user experience as much as possible, to get users who are loyal and who will help you to get to the next phase in the process. Didn't put up editorial rankings, provide filters to let people know things like what people who are tall think of a car. Invited out a few thousand people who were considered trusted enthusiasts, generated 23 thousand reviews. Had to implement a cuss-word filter. Good stuff, impressive.

Jonathan Hoy, LexisNexis - The blog experience. Mainstream media sees weblogs as mainstream bottom-scrapers, not creative, relying on MSM. Not parasite, more symbiotic, like remoras cleaning parasites off of sea fish. No remoras found in shark stomachs - true for weblogs also? Editorially selected, treated as full-text news articles. Makes L/N a blog archive, as with other news sources. 59 percent viewed by U.S. coporates, used for reputation management, Tracking product "buzz," fodder for story generation, Federal government tracking trends such as opinions on avian flu, legal analysis & insight. Interface is the standard L/N interface. While not the stuff that may get your palms sweaty, it's a better use of weblogs as news as compared to say Factiva Insight, where weblogs are treated more as opinion rather than news.

Great presentations and insights, it's exciting to see these leaders pushing towards making good use of social media content. It's a race to keep ahead of users creating their own communities using content technology tools that enable themselves as publishers, but the sooner a publisher or aggregator attracts a community to their site to generate engaging content, the better.

Labels: Buying and Selling eContent, events, FT.com, PennWell

There are a quarter million media sites, 70 million blogs, heading towards 100 million, different types of content, YouTube phenomenon illustrates the accelerated pace of change. YouTube started surfacing was in August of 2005. Fewer than 70 article. 2006 early 3,000, late 2006 30,000 articles. People are adopting YouTube rapidly, 65,000 new videos a day. Contrast with adaoption of PC, started with primitive machines in 1970s. Pace is likely to continue, consider recent IDC report, last year 161 exabytes of content created last year, 3 million times all books ever written. Will continue to surge. Email inboxes now 1.6 billion inboxes. Talking about a revolution in social media in 1995, ten years after the birth of the Web.

Innovation, simplicity, continuous evolution, accessibility are key.

People love the simplicity of Google ads, continuous improvement. Innovative in the development of ad models, poised to change via pay per action. No longer necessary to own the data. Housingmaps.com combines Google Maps and housing data. Web 2.0 makes two-way communications the focus, allowing the user to participate, collaborate and contribute. "If we don't find ways to let readers interact, we will be left behind in the Web 1.0 world." eBay harnessed collective intelligence, Amazon promotes "good reads," MySpace, others driven by users, mostly young but the future work force.

The intersection of technology and society is powerful, kids and prosumers not the only ones to recognize it. Investors have doubled Web 2.0 investments.

How do we create blue sky ideas? Sellers need to innovate, engage prosumers, engage creatively and simply. Offers unlimited opportunities for innovation. Become customer-intimate and you will find new ways to add value to your content. Must be convenient, fast, provide relevant content, customization, personalization, essential in an exabyte world. New business models must evolve, must transform businesses. New partnerships, distribution channels, coopetition, redefine market focus. Buyers will be successful as 2.0 companies and focus on user experience and the technology and social philosophy of Web 2.0. Fostering community and collaboration, encouraging employees to contribute to the collection, be internal "prosumers." Simple, reliable mobile desktop capabilities essential. At FAST conference, Factiva exec accepted innovation award, employee captured it on video, posted it on YouTube, wrote a brief, provided a link. Enterprise 2.0 in a nutshell, drives innovative advantage. When we think of social networks, we need to think of it in terms of internal collaboration and collaboration with customers. Acquisition of WebEx and Tribe.com by Cicsco, making the technology network a social network.
Each year Edelman publishes trust barometer, trust shifting to peers, buyers and sellers of econtent need to be open to mixing journalistic and prosumer content. Dow Jones recognizes that we need to include Web sites and blogs, part of content collection 2 years ago (?), Web ten years ago. Dow Jones in Web 2.0: beyond WSJ and averages to company with 60 percent print, moving towards 50 percent digital revenues (COMMENT: fast enough?) Enterprise business unit comprises financial information services (private equity, capital, FX, etc., newsletters, events), DJIA and other indices, new content technology solutions - newswires, licensing, B2C as well as B2B, Factiva. It became clear that Factiva would be stronger with one owner, in the end Factiva was more strategic to Dow Jones. Only company of full spectrum of news from low-latency news for algorithmic trading, consulting, working to leverage Web 2.0 technologies, personal pages, shared pages, dynamic newsletter creation, DJ and Factiva embrace Web 2.0 by allowing users to freely share and collaborate.
****************
Great presentation, and I think that Clare "gets it," as Ken Marlin mentioned on the intro, but to some degree the Web 2.0 talk is dressing up long-established traditional enterprise content integration in new clothes. Enterprises tend to develop new content facilities with trusted partners, so this is not to say that competitors are going to swoop in with off-the-shelf solutions with true Web 2.0 technologies, but especially in financial I am not sure that today's vendors "get" just how empowered the "prosumers" are to collect and collaborate on content.

Labels: Buying and Selling eContent, Clare Hart, events