 |
|
|
Birds and Mammals: The SIIA Content
Forum Outlines Evolutionary Paths for Publishers |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
17 May 2006 |
|
|
|
|
This year's SIIA Content Forum in San Francisco was a
robust gathering of content professionals, with great
panels providing details on content product development,
deployment, licensing, relicensing and search marketing.
With an impressive panel of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs and Chris
Anderson reminding us how large the "Long Tail" of content
has become it would be easy to dismiss many at the
conference as the "old guard" ready to head the way of
dinosaurs. But evolution doesn't always turn out the way
that you think that it will. Be prepared for the rapid
evolution of many content companies into high-flying
survivors that can feast on the best contextual
opportunities for marketing content. |
|
This year's
SIIA Content Forum
took place San Francisco's
Westin St. Francis Hotel, a vintage facility that is half
in the past and half in the present. We spent the first day in
a rather dank room in the older part of the hotel, but the next day
we were on the top floor of a very modern
tower adjoining the original facility with breathtaking views
of the Bay and the city. It's an apt analogy for where the
content industry finds itself these days - trying to evolve
beyond cramped and inefficient ways of doing business in favor
of more high-flying quarters. But as keynote speaker
Geoffrey Moore noted the road to more highly evolved forms
of business requires a commitment to innovation and a
willingness to let go of the notion that we're entitled to our
place at the table. If there's not that commitment, major
trends can knock you off the evolutionary tree much as dinosaurs largely missed the evolutionary boat.
Largely. As we witness the fast rise
of user-generated
media it's tempting to say that the "old guard" is going to go
the way of the dinosaurs and that the new but thriving
"mammals" of social publishing are going to take over.
Certainly the Silicon Valley-driven Web 2.0 movement is
generating a different species of publisher, as exemplified by
Kevin Rose, founder of the Digg social tagging service. In his
gladly geekish presentation at the conference Kevin showed all
sorts of cool takes on community-based online publishing and
was blissfully unaware of many of the issues that people at the
conference were wrestling with. All he knows is that Digg is
making money and growing. Mammals are just doing just fine, thank you very much. But there's another take on
evolution that may escape some Web 2.0 enthusiasts: the
dinosaurs didn't go away. They evolved into lighter and more
flexible critters that could migrate rapidly to where
conditions were best for them. Today we call the dinosaurs'
ancestors birds.
Who will be the birds of the established content companies?
Many publishers at the conference have
struggled mightily to come
up with evolutionary models that could help them to adopt the
best of new publishing practices. As detailed in our
events weblog coverage of the Content Forum the trend is towards deploying new content
products rapidly and incrementally, worrying less about being
"best in class" and more about developing new
content services collaboratively with highly focused audiences
in the growing "long tail" of content outlined by luncheon
keynoter
Chris Anderson. While the audience for these messages may
have looked like dinosaurs to some, the evolutions outlined in
the conference indicate that there will be many healthy
survivors.
With that said, though, there are few prominent points
coming out of the conference that the dinos, birds and mammals of
content need to bear in mind as we go deeper into this
evolutionary period:
- The mammals wound up with the real estate. While
birds found a highly successful place in the food chain, for
the most part they lost their land-based territories. Rapidly
evolving user-generated and user-centric content services are becoming
the "first stop" destinations for people trying to
find valuable content in both media and enterprise content
markets. Many publishers are challenged to address this
fundamental real estate issue. They're used to owning or
licensing the location of their content, where instead they
need to become more willing to accept that their role is to
get to user-defined locations as quickly and effectively as
possible and to make the most of it in the context available
at the moment. Hanging on to waning real estate out of pride
of ownership can have disastrous consequences for publishers
who are unwilling to make this shift to gaining value from
context instead of distribution.
- Dinosaurs snacked on mammals - and still do. The enormous surge in
user-generated content has generated tremendous interest and
shifting of strategies at major content companies. Right now
the market growth is largely in favor of these newcomers, in
large part due to the increased efficiency of advertising
markets that allow well-contextualized content of all kinds
to be monetized fairly easily. Many content dinos are
snacking on this fresh and fat user-generated mammal meat
already to fuel their inefficient ways. But the bliss that
many user-generated plays enjoy is likely to become a bit
more limited as evolved publishers start to swoop down from
above with a far broader view of the opportunities to be made
out of their content. Nobody's asking the Web 2.0 crowd
to love the publishers, but in time they are going to learn
some hard-earned respect for those who survive and thrive as
content's eagles.
- Dinosaurs had to change their metabolism to make the grade.
Undoubtedly the dinosaurs had a metabolism problem that held
them back from fitting in to a more evenly-sized food chain
as time went on. Big isn't bad, but it has to fit the
conditions at hand. The metabolism of most publishers and
aggregators is set by content licensing agreements, which, as
seen in the conference, are becoming more onerous rather than
simpler as publishers wrestle with trying to control the
context of content with a legal and commercial framework
built around controlling copies. This can only mean hunger
over time for publishers as it becomes harder and harder to
engineer their old-fashioned revenue diets. The publishers
most willing to work aggressively towards licensing based on
context rights rather than copyright are going to have the
most efficient revenue structures to feed their need for
profits.
Survival in publishing may mean accepting that content
companies need to be smaller and lighter in many ways, but
survival offers its own beauty. Evolution offers no promises to
anyone, though: changes to public policy and other macro events
could choke off the mammals as easily as the dinosaurs. But
given the astounding success that context-oriented companies
such as Google have enjoyed in recent years there's strong
reason to think that the era of birds and mammals is already
well under way. For those feeling a little heavy around the jaw
line: start building some wings.
-
John Blossom
To top of
page
 |
