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| Friday, March 31, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:03 PM |
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| Thursday, March 30, 2006 |
 Business Week notes along with other majors Google's readying a stock offering that's expected to yield about USD 2 Billion at it's current prices - about enough to purchase the Facebook.com personal content portal, by perhaps no small coincidence. Facebook is about on par with Google's Orkut personal portal in traffic, but both are trailing News Corporation's Myspace.com personal content portal by a long shot: Myspace comes up number 8 in Alexa's latest Web site rankings. This can only warm Rupert Murdoch's heart, as noted by Forbes, who raised quite a few eyebrows when he bought the upstart portal for USD 580 million last July. With Myspace's surging growth - tripling traffic since last July - this now begins to look like a bargain. So perhaps 2 Billion is not too much to ask for a Facebook, the thinking goes. But looking at the historical traffic, it's not clear that Facebook adds up to a 2 Billion solution for Google. Although it came on strong in the past few months, Facebook's overall traffic has leveled off, according to Alexa, and still remains below Myspace's level of last July when they were acquired. Facebook may be a good acquisition, but it's doubtful that it's going to command the top line price they're seeking. Google could instead get a more reasonable price for Facebook and spread investments into other lucrative areas. Certainly their financial portal is a good start on offering more information to adults that can command valuable advertising, so expanding relationships with vendors such as Reuters in finance and other sectors may yield a broader demographic for advertisers keen for more valuable outlets for ad inventory. It's important to keep apace with the younger generations growing up on the Web, but the greatest gains in margins may be in servicing graying but affluent surfers effectively. We'll see where this goes but I am betting on some surprises in how Google puts these new funds to work.
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:00 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:19 PM |
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| Wednesday, March 29, 2006 |
InfoUSA's OneSource Information Services has announced the addition of its Account Intelligence service to Salesforce.com's AppExchange add-on software and content service store. The service pumps cleansed contact data and relevant news, research and data on companies right into a user's SF.com service, with administrative controls similar to OneSource's earlier offerings via this service. In playing with the AppExchange kit it's interesting to see how self-service sales for business content services have been extended to provide a sophisticated sales presence online. In addition to product information sheets and user reviews OneSource provides a slide show with built-in audio narrative based on Macromedia's Breeze application narrated by a sales executive. It's a reminder that people buy business content at the "point of pain" and that both services and marketing need to follow the users into the contexts that they value most to have those pain points addressed. Being able to get content into user workflows on an as-needed basis took a huge step forward when Salesforce.com introduced AppExchange: now it's time for more business content providers to examine how both services and marketing can move to where users have the need and to sell them in context on the value of their services.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:00 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:29 AM |
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In the ever-evolving battle for the pockets of local business advertisers the yellow pages industry has been fighting a tough battle to retain the advertising dollars of grass-roots patrons. More and more of these businesses are discovering that the first stop for people looking for local services increasingly draws them to major search engine portals. Increasingly this means not even bothering with the "local pages" offered up by one of these portals but just typing in what you think you need into the main search box of a portal and trusting the search engine to do the rest. This works increasingly well on search engines like Google, which have awareness of one's locality through examining your network connection and can use that data to put search results - and ads - in a more local context. So small wonder, then, that telecoms giant Verizon has announced that its SuperPages online yellow pages service has joined Google's AdWords reseller network to channel its advertisers into the contextual ads that appear on Google's search results and via other channels. This expands the Verizon relationship with Google in which they were providing profiles of their advertisers to Google. Yet one wonders whether this may not be a harbinger of broader business relationships yet to come for telecoms providers and Google. This of course helps Verizon to extend the reach of its marketing power for local advertisers into existing Google channels and provides Google indirectly with a huge sales force that engages small businesses on the level that most are used to dealing with to manage their tiny ad budgets. But given Google's push into wireless markets this may also be the start of a relationship that could result in a very convenient way for pumping ads into the ad-supported wireless services that Google is preparing to launch. I think of this especially in light of the recent patent filings by Google focused on providing sponsorship of browser windows and managing ads via wireless services. What better way to inject new life into yellow pages ads than to have an ad appear on your wireless device when you're closest to that local merchant? We have been telling people for some time to prepare for the seismic changes that are likely to unfold as Google begins to enable wireless services; the Verizon announcement is but one more reminder that this future is not so far off.
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By John Blossom - posted at 7:57 AM |
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| Tuesday, March 28, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:38 AM |
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| Monday, March 27, 2006 |
The announcement of an upgraded version of the popular Buzznet social publishing portal happens to coincide with the conclusion of spring break activities for many college students, so it's not surprising that the portal features photos, comments and stories from this annual pilgrimage of party spirits. It also helps to underscore the increasing similarity of many of these services: there are only so many ways that you can post pictures, comments and other personal content, just as there are only so many ways that you can go into a bar and get drunk. From the users' standpoint, that's probably not a problem. Kids love to hop from one hot spot to another, so having a variety of social content services at their disposal is probably not too different from having a strip of bars along the beach in Fort Lauderdale to support their real-world social endeavors. Wherever the scene gathers at the moment, there they go, from one bookmark to the next. But this vagabond spirit also highlights the importance of developing communities that are likely to have a little higher quality clientele and more of a sense of true community rather than casual relationships if advertisers are to make the most of social content services. There's plenty of money to be made in social content "gin mills," but it's in general a far better idea to be thinking about your audiences ahead of time and setting up features and reefs of high-quality content that are likely to attract a specific type of clientele for your advertisers. This may sound a little too much like - gasp! - publishing for some people's tastes, but as the breadth of social content services grows ever wider it will become far more important to think out loud ahead of time as to what you want your clientele to be when the party's over.
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:17 PM |
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A mochila is a lightweight backpack, the type that students everywhere stuff with books, iPods and other useful content. The new Mochila content syndication service has a similar concept: let publishers pick up just what fits their needs from other publishers and then run with it wherever they need to take it. Mochila's by-the-item syndication allows licensees to pay for content outright or to take it for free if they're willing to use Mochila-provided ads. It's an idea whose time may be just right given the explosion of content destinations that attract today's users. Could Mochila be the tool that creates an explosion in ad hoc online syndication? Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:07 PM |
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Reputation management and media intelligence services have been hot on the lips of many content providers as of late, but selling content services into a specialized community such as public relations professionals can get a little sticky for a content companies. There are ways of doing business in the trade and consultancies that have been in the space for decades that are going to be far ahead of publishers in industry knowledge and networking. So its no great surprise that Factiva has announced a new affiliate network program to support its marketing efforts to support its line of services supporting public relations consultancies and agencies. This logical move, though, points up one of the continuing challenges faced by aggregators as they identify more and more specific market niches into which they can deploy content services: how to sell a content solution for business problems when the solutions providers in that space have their own way of doing business. Working with I.T.-oriented companies as partners to provide premium content services in enterprise and online portals is one thing: working with business solutions providers that may touch upon content technologies only lightly in their main line of consultancy is quite another. Yet this is the future for many content service providers identifying specific niches for complex services that can drive up revenues and margins. Working with affiliate networks can be difficult and can eat into margins, but where a content provider's brand is not well established in a specific market segment affiliates make great sense for supporting an initial penetration into narrow but lucrative niches. It makes sense especially for a company such as Factiva, which has a lot of irons in the fire and cannot afford to hire and train over-specialized sales professionals to service a specific niche with relatively limited market potential. As more and more business content providers define more niche-oriented opportunities on the high end of their markets the search for effective sales affiliations will become more important -and will inevitably push business content providers more into the roles of the companies with which they affiliate in order to maximize their revenues. Sales and marketing channel conflicts are likely to erupt in these affiliate programs as content companies try to build more home-grown penetration, but if content providers are interested in becoming business solutions providers that can dominate given solutions niche they will have to juggle affiliates and their own sales and implementation capabilities quickly and carefully to extend their relationships as broadly as possible. Over time this may mean that many business aggregators will come to resemble management consultancies more than content vendors - and that may not be a bad thing. It may also indicate the types of companies to which many high-end business content solutions providers may market their exit strategies in the years ahead. But in the meantime, there's lots of money to be made via affiliates to enhance business content's value in specific market sectors.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:52 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:33 AM |
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Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:00 AM |
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| Friday, March 24, 2006 |
The AP notes along with many others the technology winners and losers in the delayed launch of Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system, but the potential impact to content producers goes largely uncovered so far. Vista was to have been the lock-down platform for digital rights management that would solve the distribution issues of many media and publishing companies. Now delayed into 2007, 2006 becomes a year in which there will be far greater uncertainty amongst content producers about which path to take in protecting intellectual property rights. This opens up a huge window of opportunity for content producers to rethink their DRM strategies and to reconsider how open DRM standards or less platform-dependent proprietary systems may be able to help them make progress in their plans to protect intellectual property via rights management. It may also give enterprise-oriented companies a new opportunity to think about how the rapid progression of enterprise DRM to support compliance and legal retention requirements may need to be considered anew as factors in packaging content. While it's far from clear that content producers will start scrambling for these alternatives any time soon, the consumer side of the business doubtless sees holiday sales looming and will want to consider some plan "B"s to approach managing IP this year. Whatever their choices, the all-purpose Microsoft-centric PC as a repository for professionally produced content just took a huge step backwards. We're not likely to see Linux desktops sprouting up like weeds any time soon, but content producers may look back at this point in time and see that this was the beginning of a time when they began to consider more seriously how they could succeed independent of a Microsoft-dictated future for their content rights management.
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:46 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:42 AM |
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| Thursday, March 23, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:07 AM |
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| Wednesday, March 22, 2006 |
BBC News reports on a bill now passed by the lower house of France's legislature that would require content providers to offer non-proprietary DRM software on devices such as Apple's iPod. The bill is headed to France's Senate, but in the meantime according to the BBC Apple is firing back decrying "a state-sponsored culture of piracy." This of course ignores evolving open DRM standards promoted by organizations such as the Open Mobile Alliance, which would encourage the use of copyrighted content with DRM controls that don't lock a user into a specific platform. While the fate of this bill is still up for grabs it's clear that European and Asian markets are going to be looking for every advantage that they can find in re-establishing their hold on rapidly emerging mobile content markets in which much of today's entertainment is going to be consumed in the years ahead. To do this they must be able both to protect intellectual property rights and have access to platforms that allow them to have a firmer say over how content is licensed and priced. Apple's long-standing approach to keeping its sliver of market share has been to develop really nicely designed products to soften the ultimately unappealing prospect of being locked into a proprietary platform. That's served them reasonably well up to this point but with a burgeoning marketplace for open standard platforms and greater consumer demand to have content licensing separated from platforms it's a battle that's not likely to favor their content lock-down scheme in the long run. But then again we're all dead in the long run, as they say, so Apple and other dominant media-oriented companies are going to continue to resist the call for open DRM standards as long as possible. In the meantime content suppliers that are glad to work with open DRM standards are likely to increase over the next few years, creating new forms of competition based both on the inherent quality and marketability of DRM-enabled content and |
