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Motley Crew: The EContent 100 Reflects
the Diversity of a Changing World of Content |
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6 December 2004 |
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This year's EContent 100 list of the companies that matter
most in digital content that is assembled by EContent
magazine includes Shore Communications Inc. and, oh yes,
some other folks that you may have heard of such as
Thomson, Google, IBM and the like. "And the like" is a
phrase that may be hard for some to grasp when they look at
the full breadth of companies receiving this honor, given
the diversity of their historic missions. But as the
digital content industry focuses on increasingly common
goals it's clear that the diversity that EContent
magazine has focused on since its inception is beginning to
coalesce into a new industry norm that puts the value of
content as perceived by its audiences at the fore as never
before. Diversity will remain this group's hallmark for
some time even as their goals become more common. |
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Upon having
been offered membership in the
Friar's Club, an elite group of
show business personalities, the film star and comedian
Groucho Marx is said to have penned a curt dismissal of the
honor: "Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to
any club that will have me as a member." I don't think that
we'll be writing any such letter to the editors of
EContent
magazine any time soon, for we at Shore are truly honored to be among
the few in our industry selected to their list of this year's 100 companies that matter most in the
digital content industry. We'd certainly be more than glad to
don formal wear with this motley crew any day. And motley it
is: the
EContent 100 is highly representative of a diverse industry
that is learning how to make
vContent in many different ways, leveraging
technology and human know-how as much as the ins and outs of
traditional content publishing to create value for today's
individuals and institutions. Yes, I.T. matters, but not simply
because it's providing efficiency: from content management to
search engines to collaboration tools, today's content world is
about creating value for audiences, no matter what the business
model may be to leverage that value.
But do these companies themselves
recognize their unity as they lunge towards new and changing
business models? A year ago or so I'd have had my doubts, but
it's becoming clear that these companies share not only
increasingly common revenue goals and methods to acquire them
but an awareness that they're a part of a common competitive
framework for reaching professionally-oriented content markets.
As the fee-based information services focus on creating value
for their clients in workflow applications they run up against
the strategies of the companies providing content management,
search engines and knowledge management software more
intentionally than unwittingly (see the recently
announced collaboration between Ovid Technologies and
MuseGlobal, for instance). There are only so many ways that
both individuals and institutions are willing to pay to get
value out of their content, a factor that increasingly calls
companies to consider chasing one another's bacon. Yesterday's
ROI arguments for content and related technologies called for
systems statistics, human performance metrics and patron
service ratings: today's ROI is more about defining a unified
service infrastructure that results in direct contributions to
the top line as well as the bottom line. When content is this
central to the well-being of an individual or institution,
traditional models that separated "real" content from any and
all content that can contribute to that goal tend to fall by
the wayside.
While this year's EContent 100 represents
a diverse core group driving digital content in today's
institutionally-oriented marketplace, there are players out
there whose contributions should be considered for a future
iteration of this club's membership. Here are a few of our
thoughts on categories to consider for future EContent 100s:
- Content ecommerce. The "Digital
Rights Management" category is one in which the focus is
moving away from simply locking down content and towards
enabling content value in a wide variety of contexts. Though
their consumer orientation would probably keep them out of
the EContent 100 directly, expect companies such as Shared
Media Licensing, Inc., creators of the
Weed
rights management system enabling content to be monetized as
it's onpassed, and new companies such as
SNOCAP
to represent the beginning of a new wave of rights management
capabilities that enable both traditional publishers and
individuals and institutions to find profits from content in
ways that they had never considered before. We'd also hope
that the broadening array of companies that help content
creators with contextual advertising and other forms of
monetizing content contextualization would receive the
recognition that their capabilities are key to content being
monetized through more professionally-oriented online venues
than ever before.
- eBooks. From
Overdrive's
surging support for distributing rights-protected content on
PDAs and phones via today's lending institutions to everyday
authors finding new ways to market content and ideas
effectively, eBooks are a part of the vContent world that has
made enormous strides this year. Most importantly eBooks are
creating a commercial platform for content via lending models
that closely parallel the kinds of commercial models that are
forming the basis for monetizing a wide array of content for
both individuals and institutions. Lending libraries are not
going away and are going to become an increasingly important
factor in how content is monetized in many settings. Taking
the eBooks model more seriously is an important step to
understanding how publishers can develop a more layered
approach to developing revenues for digital content.
- Content Service Providers. Much
of the original buzz has worn off the development of "Web
mining" technologies, yet these and other technologies that
create new forms of content for specific clients and markets
are a central component in how both content companies and the
institutions that they serve are creating new content value.
These kinds of capabilities are especially important to firms
such as hedge funds, which need new forms of information to
derive trading opportunities in financial securities, and
directory and database publishers, which are constantly in
search of new forms of information important to their
marketplaces made available in well-packaged formats. From
Eliyon
to Connotate to
Corzen there is a
widening array of companies that are learning how to create
monetizable content value where it never existed before.
In a world in which both individuals and
institutions are using more powerful tools than ever before to
create valuable content, the EContent 100 has matured into a
group of companies moving past the bleeding edge of technology
for technology's sake and towards an era in which the enormous
returns on investment long promised by digital content are
finally being realized with increasingly affordable solutions.
While we don't expect the ghost of Groucho to be knocking at
the doors of EContent magazine any time soon it's clear
that the diversity of this crew will continue to widen, even as
they focus on increasingly common goals for success. We can
hardly wait for the next formal invite.
-
John Blossom
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