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| Monday, July 31, 2006 |
A flurry of "innovations" are making their way into major newspapers lately: links to competitive sources, weblogs and user comments are a few of the developments trying to stir things up. Yet why is it that these new features seem so...old? As new data from Pew Research shows news audiences old and young are no strangers to other sources of news online and are migrating to them at the expense of traditional news outlets. News organizations have to retrain their noses and get pack to picking up the real scent of news that their audiences seek. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:13 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:47 AM |
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| Sunday, July 30, 2006 |
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 10:11 PM |
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| Friday, July 28, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:13 PM |
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 While Chris Anderson's book on The Long Tail is streaking to the top of Amazon book sales - today number twelve on overall sales and number two in business books - detractors and scrutinizers are mounting. Lee Gomes argues in the Wall Street Journal argues that a closer scrutiny of data from online content vendors and stats gatherers such as Bloglines reveals that it's still very much a "hits" economy, with a thin slice of content accounting for the lion's share of profits (I believe that his Bloglines analysis is faulty: measuring which weblogs have feeds fails to account for readers who visit a weblog and do not take feeds). Tim Wu on Slate doubts the concept's extendibility into arenas beyond content and argues that standardization into "hits" is more important in other industries such as information technology where it's allowed mass access to content. Interesting points, but perhaps the most comely retort comes from AlacraBlog, which has generated its own analysis of its sales of business information reports and presented it in graphical form. The chart is actually a more extreme plot than Anderson's examples: the top 1000 companies which business information searchers retrieved only account for 17% of the company snapshot page views, with the tens of thousands of other companies covered in Alacra's content sets accounting for the bulk of accesses. Like many business information providers Alacra's business model is not built around "hits" but around helping professionals find the needle in the haystack that's going to make a difference to them in very contextual situations. But of course these users needed the organization of content provided by Alacra or other services to find these gems. Michael Andrews on Modules and Wholes notes that to navigate through and evaluate the long tail, people must rely on logical organization or social organization (the opinion and behavior of others). In other words, tools such as search engines, weblogs, text mining and social bookmarking have been able to highlight content based on the interests of much more focused communities - and the more focused the service providing servicing those interests, the better. This is why the content companies in business sectors succeed when they take the most agnostic attitude possible towards high-end content services: the curve of popularity matters far less than the curve of content that produces value for an organization. Lee Gomes' analysis has merit, but only insofar as it focuses on marketing chains that are geared towards hits in the first place. It's a self-predicting model, one which is skewing ever more heavily towards a micro-slice of content that makes mega-profits. In short, organizations focused on making hits will continue to focus on making hits for ever-shallower demographics, whereas organizations focused on letting hits make their own popularity based on the interests of a community will create new types of popular content whose monetization potential is barely touched. In sum the Long Tail will prosper wherever people focus on immediate interests and needs that are largely self-marketing through the tools and communities enabled by today's content services.
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:40 AM |
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| Thursday, July 27, 2006 |
When Jason Calacanis posted last week an offer to pay top social bookmarkers at Digg and other services USD 1,000 to come do the same for Netscape's redesigned bookmark-driven portal it ignited a firestorm of comments from webloggers and the leaders of the soon-to-be-poached portals. A recent post by head Digger Kevin Rose sums up the anti-Netscape side of the argument nicely: "Think of what your loyal Netscape users must think - you're essentially telling them that they aren't good enough and that you have to buy better users." Calacanis retorts: "You're making money from advertising and you can easily afford to pay the top 12 users $1,000 a month each--share the wealth dude! Why not carve out 10-20% of your revenue for users?" And that's the high-brow end of the conversation... Beneath all of this posturing both of these camps make strong points. Jason is right that there's no harm in rewarding users on many levels for their participation in a community. It's worked for many years at About.com where paid docents assemble both content and links to key pages on the Web to turn their avocations or vocations into cash. Newsvine has a recognition system for user-posters that could be easily turned into a rewards model and Gather already rewards content contributors with gift certificate points. Different ways to build content and community, but each successful in their own right through recognizing the value of contributors in concrete ways. Building multi-tiered rewards systems are a key to successful user-driven content aggregation and distribution. With a media-trained audience to educate on new ways of relating to content, Netscape faces an uphill battle in getting these users to adapt social bookmarking ways. Bookmarking "Navigators" will help Netscape to prime the process and to provide professionalism that these users still expect for guidance. The challenge that Calacanis faces is clear when one looks at the heatmap of topic interest on Netscape: celebrities, gossip, security and sex lead the list. It's a mainstream crowd, as is also reflected in the very typical stories culled from mainstream news organizations that adorn the "user selected" front page items. By contrast Digg's most popular selections for the day from a community more than twice the size of Netscape's are awash in quirky content from all sorts of sources, including today's top choice - a bootlegged video from The History Channel showing how an Israeli pilot landed an F-15 fighter with only one wing left on the plane ( Diet Coke and Mentos, where are you when we need you?). Somewhat of a contrast to Netscape's top story: " Al Quaeda Calls for Holy War Against Israel, " with accompanying Netscape Anchor commentary. There is an organic genuineness to the Digg selections, which , though frustrating for someone really trying to figure out what's going on in the world, reflect the true nature of like-minded content seekers who are very open-minded about what's interesting on the Web. It's not likely that Netscape is going to make significant inroads to that community's interactions just by poaching a few taggers: the goals of the two communities are so very different that they're not likely to have much overlap at this point. But at the end of the day growth will tell the tale. In spite of - or perhaps because of - all of the negative press Netscape has been on a gentle uptick in popularity these past few weeks according to Alexa stats. By contrast, while Digg is hardly dying it seems to have reached the overall limits of its community's growth for now. As noted in our recent News Analysis Content Nation is built up of a wide variety of communities, with users who want to influence others a huge nation unto themselves. But there's a much broader nation who are still content to soak in the sights on a passive basis. It's not clear that the Netscape audience will be converted easily to more interactive online ways, but the potential growth factor for converting mass media audiences into participants in a mature and multi-layered community is significant. In the meantime, the chaos of Digg has been barely harvested and is in danger of being squandered for lack of a more sophisticated management of its content strategy. True communities require both participation and leadership, leadership which recognizes that economic viability that's equitable to all will be a key factor in allowing a community to thrive in the long run. Netscape may yet stumble under the tutelage of mass media mavens who cannot adjust easily to the type of content that user-driven communities seek out, but with a predisposition to helping people make money as a reasonable goal it may have more options to consider without hitting the hypocrisy button in the eyes of its audience.
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:30 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:52 PM |
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| Wednesday, July 26, 2006 |
When ECNext introduced its Manta portal for business intelligence report sales last fall it enjoyed rapid growth that translated into both strong ad revenues and healthy sales of reports from Dun & Bradstreet, Datamonitor and other key sources. But how do you transition from an search engine placement service for in-and-out report sales into a service that can help users to linger and click a little more on the merchandise? The answer for ECNext: bring more destination business content into play. The announcement of Manta's addition of company profile information on pages that make company reports available for sale highlights the importance of having an ecommerce environment that is not segregated from a media environment. Landing pages for companies covered by Manta now include by default basic information such as location, phone numbers, industry codes and lines of business and a thumbnail Google map. Those who go through a quick registration process get additional content such as year of incorporation, annual sales, number of employees and so on. In both registered and non-registered versions a scroll-down brings one to the reports available for sale through ECNext's ecommerce capabilities as well as to related company links. The registration-enhanced version does a somewhat better job than the default version of leading one to the reports for sale, but having a default version that puts important information on the page that can act as in-line metadata for search engines should improve Manta's ability to appear relevant in search results to draw in more registrants. Both default and registered versions are significant enhancements for Manta that should drive both ad revenues and report sales. Manta is plying the ground between free yellow pages services and premium online business information services such as Hoover's which mix a media model with a subscription model for most of its content access. By skipping the subscription component Manta suggests that it's possible to build a business information publishing strategy that can appeal to more situational users who generally need a much lower level of service for business information but who are willing to spring for specific content as circumstances dictate. That seems to fit the profile of many business information users today, so we expect Manta to have a good level of success with this strategy. While it may not yet add up to a business that will compete with a Hoover's-scale presence any time soon it's a good move to help ECNext keep potential rivals at bay as they develop a unique combination of business information services to appeal to a crowd that's looking at a broad array of businesses to fulfill a broad array of motivations.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:03 PM |
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The tide appears to be turning at Reuters as Tom Glocer's Core Plus strategy seems to be ready to start returning on major investments in the midst of markets that favor their strengths. Reuters reports a likely 5 to 6 percent revenue growth rate based on constant currency adjustments. The details (PDF) reveal that operating profit from continuing operations is up 16 percent overall, with restructuring charges from the absorption of Telerate mostly complete and major infrastructure investments beginning to pay off. Reuters electronic trading products are benefiting from the expansion of private trading channels amongst financial institutions, while demands for exchange data are increasing as automated trading services and high-end analytics services grow in sophistication. Having pared down the cost of delivering commoditized content and having pushed up investments in unique transaction-driven content and analytics Reuters is in a good position to challenge Bloomberg for more market share. The Bloomberg team is wrestling with a transition into a marketplace that is favoring all-purpose desktop services and commoditized back office solutions less and less. Reuters' greatest enemy - investment firm entropy - seems to be fading into the background for the next few years as major institutions accelerate the shift to more profitable private trading and try to discover new ways to package their own intellectual property for financial markets. But the brightest story is in the growth of Reuters' media sales, where revenues grew 14 percent in 1H06 and are up 47 percent from 1H05. At GBP 87 million the media division is still a relatively small contributor to overall profits but with a top 300 Web site and a successful syndication strategy Reuters news is managing both strong profits and strong brand development. Reuters media products provide a great example of a well-managed channel strategy that balances its surging direct revenues with opportunities to extend the brand through broader search engine exposure via well-placed outlets. Investments in data mining are likely to pay off in more news beats for financial markets, which will be needed given the more aggressive stance of Thomson Financial in this area, but with a larger audience that includes both consumers and professionals Reuters has a broader revenue base through which to leverage such news investments. The sun is still breaking through the clouds of iffy financial markets and an uncertain global economy, but these very factors may help to increase reliance on the global services of Reuters in the short run before people worry about any new belt-tightening that may be on the horizon. Reuters is emerging as a company that must be respected for sticking to its guns and developing a successful strategy for moving into a new world of business and media content which favors those who can move with the conversations of the markets to their most profitable contexts. No pain, no gain, they say; hopefully the worst of pain is behind Reuters now.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:18 AM |
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The announcement that Thomson Financial has teamed up with UpTick Data Technologies to generate news stories using its data mining tools is on one level not terribly surprising. The use of text and data mining technologies in financial markets has accelerated in recent years, allowing investment firms to discover insights from raw inputs in small enough time frames to make real differences in their investment strategies. Time frames are crucial to news organizations as well, especially those that cater to the investment crowd, but beats on straight news stories for corporate events are not always easy to come by in an era of Fair Disclosure regulations. This is pushing financial news services to provide more analysis and insight into market trends. The first target for the TF/UpTick alliance is mining Thomson's own data and analyst's earnings estimates from its First Call service to come up with automated comparisons of estimates to actual corporate earnings reports. Fairly humdrum stuff, but if it gives Thomson a beat it's not humdrum stuff at all - it's then valuable insights into expected market performance that will drive trading activity. With UpTick's extensive library of analysis tools expect the breadth and depth of automated analysis to come up with less obvious insights injected into news streams that can drive markets. Automation and offshoring has helped news organizations to focus their editorial talent on higher levels of market analysis. With tools such as UpTick the level of analysis provided by news wire services to the business sector is going to increase significantly. Hopefully analysts in ratings agencies and other financial publishing houses take note that there are other sources of insight that can develop rapidly thanks to content extraction technologies.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:34 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:28 AM |
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| Tuesday, July 25, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:45 PM |
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| Monday, July 24, 2006 |
A recent poll by the Pew Internet & American Life Project reveals that most of the people in the U.S. who are publishing weblogs are interested in a creative outlet for communicating with friends and family. But a significant percentage of survey respondents see influencing others as a prime motivator in publishing weblogs. If you scale up the survey data for weblog influence-seekers to its likely global proportions you wind up with the 65th largest nation in the world getting the attention of the third largest nation in the world. This Content Nation is shaping the world's communications far faster and deeper than even the most sanguine enthusiasts for personal publishing can imagine - and they've only just begun. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:23 PM |
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Rafat Ali gathers an impressive range of coverage on the recent unwrapping of Microsoft's plans for Zune, an integrated music service from Microsoft that will include downloads, an iPod-like device, a file-sharing service (of sorts - preview clips only for music) to promote social sharing of tunes and playlists and WiFi connectivity. Rafat frowns on the WiFi as a battery-draining feature that doesn't answer specific user needs, which may be a valid point, but my suspicion is that Microsoft will be using the WiFi connectivity to enable a broad array of network-enabled services, including access to music (and eventually videos) stored on home servers, in autos and in public spaces. A key issue with this initiative is that apparently it will have no compatibility with Microsoft's PlaysForSure program that ensures downloads will be compatible across participating music players, leaving competitive hardware players out in the cold. I guess someone decided that there's a lot more money in a proprietary Apple-like approach than in managing standards for other platforms. By point of interesting contrast, Information World reports on a downloadable song that will be available for USD 1.99 from Sony BMG via Yahoo which will be available in MP3 format without DRM controls. The song will be a personalized version of a Jessica Simpson tune, in which the downloader's name is included in the song. Ian Rogers posts on the Yahoo! Music blog that Yahoo sees DRM as costly and that "DRM doesn't add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day - the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform." Sony's timid step in support of this concept (who's going to want to copy a song that's been personalized with someone else's name?) should not be taken as an enthusiastic endorsement of this position, only a temporary experiment. The obvious middle ground that's not being discussed in all of this is any concept of a DRM solution that would work in the best interests of artists and consumers alike. I won't rant on long about Weed or open-source DRM standards as I've hit on those already pretty hard through the years and few major music producers have moved seriously towards them. But in the face of publisher-friendly Yahoo's statements one would think that content producers would rethink their plans and try to come up with ways to manage copyrighted materials that are not onerous and that allow users to have a broad choice of platforms from which to choose. Every time a song or book or other rights-protected piece of content is left behind on an obsolete proprietary platform is another opportunity lost for people to maintain and share their enthusiasm for a creative work. Nothing could be better for content publishers than to come up with a handful of compatible industry-wide approaches to sharing intellectual property that protect their creators and enable audiences to add value to their works over time. As it is we're going to be saddled with these format wars until the most creative content producers ally themselves with distribution systems that do a better job of turning their efforts into profits.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:59 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:12 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 9:22 AM |
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| Friday, July 21, 2006 |
Nick Denton posts a short and frank piece on Gawker Media's walking away from their Yahoo syndication deal, conveying that the lack of love had become mutual. Part of the issue may be friction from Valleywag's postings taking Yahoo Media's Lloyd Braun to task, according to Denton, but the bigger issue seems to be bottom line. Yahoo didn't seem to broaden the appeal of Gawker properties in their syndication deal and at the same time Google AdSense ads added to Gawker pages seemed to be doing very well, thank you very much. So it's back to focusing on exposing content in search engines and social media venues for the independent Gawkers. Weblogs can certainly manage to be both popular and profitable and sometimes even corporate, but they tend to thrive on their publishers being themselves and attracting audiences who can accept their perspectives with whatever grain of salt is necessary at the time. That tends to be problematic for major brand advertisers, who are concerned about reach more than the contextual quality of a particular audience. As I noted last fall major media properties cutting deals with weblogs is in some ways like old-time movie studios trying to snatch up raw talent that can be shaped into mass appeal products - except that the talent has many more independent options these days to develop audiences on their own as free agents. Trying to think of webloggers as starlets down at the soda fountain waiting to be discovered by Hollywood was always a stretch to start with in a Web world of finely focused audiences, but when the talent won't bend to help support brand advertising that's supposed to be your margin play then it becomes more problematic yet. Score one for The Long Tail and for independent publishers who can suck off the cream of audience attention while mass media content producers huddle in a smaller puddle of attention that people are willing to give to their offerings.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:05 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:58 AM |
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| Thursday, July 20, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:58 AM |
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| Wednesday, July 19, 2006 |
WSJ Online covers the disappointing earnings report posted by Yahoo, though the CNN Money story has more meaty analysis. While WSJ muses on potential seasonal factors, CNN Money dives in deeper into the real issues: a delayed launch of Yahoo's improved ad system to compete with Google's superior keyword service and questionable product investments. Yahoo has dumped a ton into its home page redesign and has invested heavily in a wide variety of online content products and services, many of which have yet to produce significant market advantages. It's perhaps a bit too early to get gloomy and doomy about the most popular Web site on the planet, but it's not beyond mentioning that Yahoo seems to be entering a new phase of product maturity - one which challenges them to come up with an effective growth formula. In short, Yahoo is becoming in some ways just another media company that's hard-pressed to hold down the production costs of content while struggling to turn its page inventory into ad sales. In the meantime rival Google goes lean and mean with product design via its highly evolutionary and exploratory approach to development and relatively trivial investments in media deals and media production. Google's still-superior keyword ad network remains for the moment far more efficient at monetizing its page inventories in search results and other destinations, allowing Google to focus investments on well-scaled infrastructure tied closely to their core mission. Redesign the home page? Shucks, not much to do there. Google's investment profile is also improved by their implicit investments in R&D: with Google employees encouraged to spend a significant portion of their time just tinkering around with new ideas, Google is likely to be more on track with "100x" ideas to accelerate revenues. Potential dangers lie ahead for Google as well, of course. It's total page views are well behind Yahoo, an indication that in spite of its dominant position in search it's still not very good in helping users to hang around and enjoy the scenery. But Google's points of inflection tend to be more mission-critical than Yahoo's: if you're on a Google page you have a pretty specific objective in mind, increasing the value of a context for advertisers. This also commends Google services to no-nonsense corporate environments more easily, where so many eyeballs wind up doing double duty for personal and business missions. With lots more traditional entertainment content and rather fluffy user-generated media (finance being a key exception), lots of people go to Yahoo but with perhaps a little less of a hard-core mission in mind. Some of Yahoo's problems will work themselves out naturally in the next few months as improved ad services for search take hold and new services mature that draw away ever more users from AOL and other suffering portals. There's nothing wrong with being an enormously successful media company, but when your hopes for growth are hinging on creating more big and bad content than the other team it's a challenge to return as high margins in the long run as efforts that are glad to let other people create and own the inventory of content that's necessary to make a buck. Yahoo may yet be able to span both worlds successfully and to subsume at least part of Google's mission, but it may wind up staying a perennial number one in traffic and a number two in profits. UPDATE: I wrote the above before news of Google's remarkably robust Q206 earnings, with a 77 percent growth in earnings and a doubling of earnings. So much for seasonal issues - when your revenues rely on the vast network of sites employing Google AdSense as well as your own page inventory to drive revenues. If Yahoo's ad network catches on later this year the top line may suffer a bit at Google, but it's likely that we'll continue to see the fundamental innovations at Google that add value to content regardless of its source to continue producing healthy margins for some time to come. IHT reminds us that Microsoft is taking a dive on earnings also as it fiddles with its Xbox video game console rollout and other costly product developments - even as they plan to buy back more stock. There are good opportunities for Google to make profitable inroads against both Yahoo and Google as they wrestle with less profitable approaches to content development.
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:18 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:12 PM |
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| Tuesday, July 18, 2006 |
Any number of media companies would sell body parts or family members to become a top 1,000 Web site; for others such a benefit comes more naturally. Comfortably nestled in at number 848 in the current Alexa rankings - even in the middle of a hot do-nothing summer - Home Depot has created a powerful online niche for selling goods and promoting its chain of home improvement stores. But with such a powerful market position, why not leverage the value of those page visits through more than online and in-store sales? Home Depot has taken the plunge and announced that it will take on advertisers for their site. Online ads will certainly benefit Home Depot's online and in-store sales as well, much in the same way that Wal-Mart's private label shopper's magazine gains ad dollars from their vendors to promote in-store sales. Ads on retail Web sites are somewhat more direct, though, in effect an extension of in-store merchandising programs, providing product promotions right in the "aisles" for shoppers. But more importantly it recognizes the power of the Home Depot site as destination content that provides a common ground for advertisers not found easily elsewhere. It's another example of corporations recognizing the media power of their own content and leveraging it to provide the most powerful communications possible that suit their goals (see our earlier analysis of Boeing's aggressive online site). While this is relatively bad news for home improvement publications, many of these that are surviving in today's niche-oriented market have gone upscale in their focus and may still benefit if they can provide niche content through sites such as Home Depot's. In other instances, as noted in our earlier news analysis on rich data, B2B-oriented media companies have found ways to repurpose nuts-and-bolts industry content into consumer-friendly services via portals such as Home Depot's. As corporations build relationships online with their markets and take their slice of audience share these types of marketing relationships will only increase. When we say at Shore that today's leading publishers are the individuals and institutions equipped with affordable publishing tools and a deep understanding of their audience's needs, we could now use Home Depot's site as one of the thumbnail graphics, I suppose.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:57 PM |
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Macworld covers along with other IDG publications a "secret" that's been very public for months: in spite of action by Agence France-Presse against Google to remove AFP news from the Google News service, AFP content shows up regularly in Google News results - from its channel partners, primarily, but in some instances from AFP's own site ( sample query). While the vast majority of AFP content seems to come from other sites taking its feed, some casual testing would seem to point to no specific constraints on perusing AFP's site directly. Google is apparently under no legal action at this time that would restrain them from crawling this content, according to the Macworld article, but in the meantime it's hard to imagine that the search results being provided by Google News are not benefiting AFP's syndicated news clients - the main focus of AFP's concerns in its complaint against Google. It's probably fair to chalk up most of Google's crawls of AFP's own site as flaws in its algorithms that need to be tuned, which leaves AFP' s syndicated product the proud beneficiary of free advertising via Google News. I suspect that this fact is not lost on AFP and that this may account for the relative silence from their side on this matter in recent months. Perhaps the IDG articles will force them to brandish the sabre for a bit, but for the most part news suppliers seem to have come to peace with search engines and have tuned their publicly available content to suit their marketing strategies accordingly. If AFP forbids their syndication partners from exposing their news in any great way to search engines it will doubtless reduce the appeal of their content to those clients. So score one for the power of search engines to enhance the value of syndicated content - for now.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:29 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:21 PM |
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| Monday, July 17, 2006 |
Another day, another content integration product for enterprises that need subscription content in valuable work contexts. But as products such as Factiva's SalesWorks(TM) rely increasingly on technology-oriented channel partners to penetrate their markets the shift into consultative selling becomes more problematic. It's great to have your content in highly valuable contexts, but if your bread and butter is knowing your clients' needs then you need to tread carefully with tech-oriented channel partners who can wind up learning a lot more than you about your markets. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:32 PM |
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Tom Gerace, CEO of the Gather online publishing community, gave me an intro to their relaunched site recently. Gone is the cluttered and confusing array of controls and features from their front page, replaced by a vastly simpler and cleaner interface that highlights key conversations happening on Gather via its user-generated articles and comments. Instead of just highlighting an article, the Gather home page display highlights a snippet from the article and a key comment that takes up a contrasting position, all framed in Yahoo-esque graphics. This provides a long-needed focus for people visiting the Gather site and provides an anchor from which one can gaze at some of the featured tags, members and discussion groups available for perusing. Gather is starting to accrue a broadening array of focused topic groups, many of which have been tweaked by their anchors into attractive sub-destinations. Many groups are anchored by users who kick things off with their own content, but the "Food Talk" topic group, anchored by Gather partner American Public Media, features a nice mix of content from both users and APM, with no real sense of "this is the 'real' media" dividing user contributions. This provides a much more conversational integration of professionally-produced media and invites comments and linking within the Gather community. Gather has focused clearly on adults with kind of an artistic and literary orientation, steering towards people who like to express themselves through writing online and who enjoy building online networks of contacts with like interests that steer away from the more teen-oriented topics of sites like MySpace. While many of Gather's features and design are still a work in progress - the "My Gather" pages are a little sparse and it's still not easy to understand what's "hottest" at a glance - it's moving away from its first phase of development into a format that's likely to appeal to a broader audience. The main question for Gather, as with most community-driven publishing sites, is how to grow it beyond a particular set of like-minded people into a broader set of audiences. Gather has had strong page viewership but stagnating audience growth, as indicated by Alexa statistics - not unusual for this type of service. Part of the answer would seem to be to extend the Gather metaphor to allow groups of users to define reference content and services that could provide answers in kind of a hybrid of Wikipedia and About.com - a string of expert-lead communities that build up more authoritative content over time that can attract higher search engine ranking to drive more incoming traffic. That's a stretch given Gather's current focus, but a next logical step. Social media is still in its very early days, with many experiments showing strength but also a lack of a mature model to drive both audience growth and focused interests of greatest value to advertisers. Gather is moving closer to that goal with its revamped site, but expect the experiments to continue at this and other social media sites.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:27 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:37 AM |
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| Sunday, July 16, 2006 |
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 10:47 PM |
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| Friday, July 14, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:53 AM |
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| Thursday, July 13, 2006 |
If you're tired of hearing about net neutrality in the US as a key regulatory issue why not take a break and see how the EC is trying to wrestle media regulations to the ground. ZDNet UK covers the Television Without Frontiers (TVWF) Directive, the legislative package that's trying to provide controls such as uniform standards for advertising and protection of minors in broadcast television. All well and good, but now in recognition of the fast proliferation of video content onto the Web they want to extend the regulations to cover online TV content as well - including new forms of video generated solely online (if that's TV at all - they don't seem to know quite yet whether that's the case). Not surprisingly major EU broadcasters think that this is a great idea, with the notable exception of the UK. The standards are meant in part to help stem the European audiovisual industry's EUR 6 to 7 billion annual deficit with US markets. While the basic provisions of this directive are fairly innocuous, as a whole it seems to be missing the real opportunities for European media companies. In a world where distribution can be instantaneous and global interest in content can arise at the drop of a hat to benefit any outlet, it would seem that the real opportunity for European publishers and producers is to create a legislative framework that will allow EC countries to jump ahead of the US in becoming net-adept content distributors and to abandon the traditional distribution hegemonies as quickly as possible. It's kind of odd that on the one hand French legislators are all for neutrality and openness in distribution media for music content on iPods but the EC cannot quite come to the same conclusion when it comes to protecting European interests invested in proprietary distribution. At a time when the US Congress is tied up with trying to shackle its media interests to outdated notions of distribution it would seem to be a wonderful opportunity to think about global markets more broadly and to consider how a net-centric approach to video can benefit European intellectual property more efficiently than US interests. Bravo to the EC on providing a framework that will bring localized broadcast interests into a common European framework. Now it's on to addressing the real opportunities at hand to create export revenues via the World Wide Web.
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:29 AM |
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Move over, Brangelina, Amandrew are taking over. There was a day when the phrase "Web celebrity" was rather an oxymoron. Now with the Webby awards starting to outshine the Emmys for glitterati in attendance it should probably come as no surprise that the echoes of the breakup of Amanda Congdon and Andrew Baron's joint work for Rocketboom is becoming the cause celebre in all forms of media. Congdon was quick to start spinning her position on cable news and in print and online press ( CNET News interview) as well as her own weblog, but in the meanwhile Baron went back to work and relaunched Rocketboom with a new anchor host Joanne Colon, who interestingly - bizarrely? - looks a heck of a lot like Congdon but with a distinct British accent and outlook. Colon already is priming her weblog to build community. Her first effort was not terrible and sets the stage for Baron to establish just where the mix of talent and personality lay in the 1.0 version of Rocketboom. In the meantime Rocketboom's 2.0 traffic has comfortably doubled in Alexa rankings, giving Baron and Colon a cushion of goodwill to exploit in tuning an established formula. Number of video weblogs from Amanda since the breakup? 0. In the meantime the supposedly edgy blogosphere was downright goo-goo with best wishes to both in the face of this limelight-generating event. John Battelle posted a brief "I wish them both well" piece that is typical of the fence-sitting, while Jeff Jarvis onpassed a gossipy email from VH1 Executive Producer Fred Graver about his lunch with Colon and Congdon last year and a few tidbits of well-seasoned advice to both. In a world driven by personal links as much as hyperlinks, this catty little coffee klatsch of media buzz is perhaps a bellweather of just how much online media personalities and stories have pushed in to the general consciousness of the public. Personality magazines have to focus on the least-common-denominator Brangelinas of the world because that's the only shot they have at their instant of value: with Web content built around highly loyal communities attached to oftentimes quirky personalities these blips of link-generating interest are harvested for what they're worth but the real story is in how the community builds organically through time. Watch this little soap opera not so much for the actual content but for lessons in how online communities built around user-generated content evolve from cultish phenomena into properties of more major interest.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:09 AM |
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Trends Tribune's Net Income Drops 62% Hurt by Atlanta, Albany TV Stations WSJ Online* Gannett 2Q Earnings Tumble 8.3 Percent AP via Yahoo! News Health Portal Wars Heating Up: Revolution, Everydayhealth, Google Health, Choice Media paidContent.org Vietnam plans strong digital content industry VNA via Thanh Nien News Lost in the Blog: Pharmaceutical Companies Need to Get In on the Conversation MediaAd News via PharmaLive A Court Rules That Privately Editing Films for Content Violates Studios' Copyright FindLaw No RSS feed? You're fired! Wisconsin Technology Net VNU Lays Off 'Week Staffers fishbowl NY Penton Stock Price Nearly Doubles FOLIO: Magazine Magazines see 3.2% gain in ad revenues in the first half BtoB Online New Rocketboom host Joanne Colan starts a blog The Blog Herald 'WaPo' Online Comments a Hit, Says Editor -- Soon on All of Site's Stories Editor & Publisher Canadian Media Group Offers to Buy Rival in Friendly Deal The New York Times* Google's antisocial downside CNET News Best Practices News Aggregation Is Online Independent Publishers Natural Next Step Robin Good Cool Tools Courting a Hot Market With Cool Phone Service The New York Times*
Deals, Partnerships & Sales John Wiley & Sons, Inc., CFA Institute Join to Deliver Finance Content to Academic, Professional Markets PR Newswire via Yahoo! FInance Products, Markets & People
Podcast Content Now Available on KnowledgeStorm PR Web
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:06 AM |
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| Wednesday, July 12, 2006 |
FOLIO: Magazine covers B2B media power Penton huddling with its investment bankers to explore "strategic alternatives" for a possible sale. Penton, which has managed to leverage its way back to profitability out of a disastrous drop during the ad recession, sees a window of opportunity as the finances of its current state are healthy enough to clamber above its debt and then some. With EBITDA earnings in 1Q06 more than doubling last year's first quarter, the rationale for planning an exit at this time is clear. Penton has succeeded in creating a lean and mean operation that is making online operations a key factor in its growth plans via a portfolio of publications that has been trimmed to suit many key sectors that can expect solid growth over the next few years. One potential weak spot is in the enterprise IT sector, where Penton's focus on Microsoft technologies may feel some pain from stalled introductions of Vista and increased competition from open source technologies in the enterprise space. M&A of this scale always seems like a bit of a musical chairs gambit in the current environment that's favoring online newcomers in many sectors as much as established titles, but if you're willing to play the game it's as good a time as any to grab a solid portfolio that's been whipped into shape as much as one can by conventional standards. Go for it, Penton, the time is right.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:01 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:38 AM |
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| Tuesday, July 11, 2006 |
Marketing for Chris Anderson's new book on "The Long Tail" hits full stride today, with splashy ads in major papers and coverage through USA Today, other major outlets, and, of course, Chris' weblog. One of the more interesting takes today comes from Stephen Bryant at Publish. Bryant critiques some of John Cassidy's critique for the New Yorker magazine, in which Cassidy questions whether the Long Tail phenomenon is really going to degrade the position of large media properties in various media forms. Cassidy notes that Web aggregation has created a handful of portals that people use as "go to" sources for long tail content, creating a new system of oligopolies that dominate access to this information. But Bryant counters that it's a little different when you have infinite inventory available through such portals - inventory that's oftentimes beyond the commercial control of the portal provider. This infinite supply of online content tends to put pressure on what Cassidy calls the economic theory of "increasing returns," in which the big get bigger and the rest fight for the scraps. Economic theories built on the assumption of limited supplies available via limited distribution channels tend to fall apart in the Web universe of content: the "scraps" turn out to be as lucrative as the "meat" when they're marketed properly. And unlike a typical closed economic system the Web neutralizes most arguments about distribution control: it becomes advantageous in a Web environment in many instances to maximize distribution through as many channels as possible rather than to restrict distribution to a handful of outlets, since demand is far more difficult to create on the Web than supply. Where both Bryant and Cassidy come to agreement is in the belief that blockbuster content will continue to thrive, pushed in part for the need for people to have something in common to talk about in a world of niche interests (witness traditional media's success with the recent World Cup coverage). That may be true, but as the Long Tail phenomenon allows the only truly finite content resource - audience attention - to be focused on a much broader array of information and experiences it becomes increasingly difficult for traditional, distribution-oriented media companies to accept investments in anything but the lowest of least-common-denominator products and services. Somewhat the opposite of Cassidy's argument, the real problem seems to be that the blockbuster phenomenon creates a need for certain success at a very specific moment in time that makes the duration of interest in such over-homogenized content highly limited over longer periods. A recent article on Physics Web points to research which demonstrates that news content lives in a mass-media sense for about 36 hours on the Web: blockbuster movies get a little more grace than that, but not much. Mass marketed media - and mass marketed merchandise in general - is concentrating on generating momentary universal value so fleeting that it is threatening to evaporate all the way up Anderson's exponential curve into nothingness. So how do media companies create value in this era? In a word: patience. Successful media companies are used to trying to create scalable products that can be called upon for renewed mass sales. This is the core of the sequel phenomenon. But what if media companies focused more on developing long tail content that can create more stable audiences over longer periods of time though its inherent value? What if the blockbuster phenomenon was just a high point in a continuing phenomenon that arose from grass roots interest and creative forces over months or decades or centuries? We can see a rough analogy to this in recent Bible-focused movie epics and synthetic legends such as "The Lord of the Rings" that make their way into films after long exposure to broadening audiences. To take it back a notch further, the Bible stories themselves were synthesized through centuries of development, with each generation adding its own twists and chapters. It's through the development and contextualization of content over time that the real value for publishing is coming to life through search engines and user- and community-driven content services. So what's going to be the next great hit? Don't worry. The audience and the authors will figure it out over time. Maybe that time will be fleeting, maybe it will be enduring, but instead of media companies trying to drive audiences to the product increasingly the audiences will drive media companies to the product. Instead of people worrying about whether a new movie - or a new book like Chris' - will be a hit or a flop perhaps we'll move to an environment in which the property has evolved and been monetized more incrementally with the participation of increasingly large audiences over time such that we will rarely have any surprises with box office numbers again. In that day we will see the blockbuster as the end of an already highly successful evolutionary process that makes its success in the moment of greatest fleeting attention of only passing interest. This is why a property like Google is so valuable - it is highly disinvested in whatever content is tops in its search rankings at any given moment and highly invested in letting it surface as efficiently as possible over time. Patience, dear publishers, patience. Your audiences are there. Go listen to them and they'll tell you where to go next - and you'll make money along the way a step at a time. The key is in the process, not the product. In the meantime I hope that Chris' book is a huge success - not because of any splashy ads or mass marketing but because the book's concept has proven itself over time and will evolve over time. Hopefully its a good enough idea that people will be patient with its evolution.
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:01 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:58 AM |
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| Monday, July 10, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:44 PM |
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We've been seeing multimedia content posted on corporate Web sites for years but few of these have the curb appeal and careful focus of Boeing's sites for its next-generation airliners. With seductive music and well-crafted interactive features, Boeing has created an experience that is more like a video gamer's alternate world than an online slide show. In doing so the bar has been raised for both corporations and publishers to consider how the Web can provide direct and immersive experiences that can sway opinion makers with both facts and feelings. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:28 AM |
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| Sunday, July 09, 2006 |
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 11:42 PM |
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| Friday, July 07, 2006 |
A recent research report announced by ABI estimates that sales of home-based content servers are expected to exceed USD 44 billion by 2011. The estimate includes both PCs as well as proprietary set-top boxes, game consoles and other home devices. Great news for consumers but a little problematic for content vendors who are still locked into strategies that will tie them down to specific delivery platforms. If the trend is to have a local library of content available on a home network server that can be used throughout the home, it would seem that it would be worthwhile for content vendors to consider how they can develop more platform-independent strategies through the evolution of these devices. The same question could be asked in enterprise circles also, of course, with similar issues: why can't content companies just drop off what I want and need on our local server via a feed with packaging that allows us to use and reuse the content effectively in many internal and external venues with as few hassles as possible? Yet again, it may be consumer technology that will be leading B2B content companies to effective answers.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:53 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:49 AM |
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paidContent.org highlights a study by PwC (PDF) with responses from 40 startup technology companies in Europe. It's not a very well-designed study for the most part but on page 3 of the report there's an interesting stat worth contemplating. When asked "Which types of companies face the most compelling opportunities from digital convergence over the next five years?" (multiple answers allowed) only 6 percent of the tech innovator companies in Europe surveyed answered that content developers for business information faced the most compelling opportunities from digital convergence - versus 46 percent for consumer content developers. Only non-consumer hardware companies scored lower for compelling opportunities (sorry, tractor manufacturers, your time will come). This is not necessarily the state of the true opportunities for digital convergence overall in B2B publishing in Europe, but it does represent what entrepreneurs are willing to do in this space - and the picture is not rosy. Some of this may come from the level of innovation that B2B publishers finance themselves, but in general it's an indication that the best and brightest minds in content technology development are not being drawn to B2B content companies in Europe by a very wide margin. With the benefits from consumer technologies that work their way into B2B content products as a matter of course this may not necessarily be a cause for concern: oftentimes consumer technologies are perfected through the use of millions of people before they're unleashed on businesses for more specialized uses. But at the end of the day the PwC study suggests that the cleverest and most aggressive folks are not being thrown against the problems that are most likely to result in more productive and profitable uses of business information. This is an equation that is not going to favor business content producers in the long run. It means that more and more business information users are going to be attracted to technologies developed first for consumers and with increasing likelihood used by professionals via the open Web with less unique value-add provided by B2B publishers. While I can't say that this study as a whole yields much useful information this particular statistic should serve as a starting point for further research. What will it take to provide levels of innovation that will drive forward profits for B2B content companies? It's worth noting, after all, that there is a rough correlation between typical B2B content margin growth and the opportunities seen by these innovators for digital convergence. Drop us a line if you'd be interested in probing the market more on this particular topic.
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:17 AM |
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| Thursday, July 06, 2006 |
Daily video weblog Rocketboom is dark today, with a terse statement on the site seemingly in contradiction with a statement by Rocketboom anchor Amanda Congdon on her weblog. The long and the short of it is that she and her partner and majority owner Andrew Baron cannot seem to come to terms at the moment as to how to proceed with the project together, leading Baron to take Rocketboom in new directions. The quirky news and documentary show was never known for its consistency, but in its high moments it brought both interesting insights and highlighted new sites and products that were worth a quick gander now and again. Just another reminder that business is business and ownership is ownership in publishing and media, no matter how edgy that you may think you are...
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:05 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:01 AM |
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| Wednesday, July 05, 2006 |
A Reuters obit touches very briefly on the life and passing of former Reuters Managing Director Glen Renfrew, who brought the company into the limelight of financial information services in the 1980s, bringing its revenues up 100x in the process. There was the matter of good timing, of course - many profited in that era from applying computer technologies to financial content distribution - but there was also the matter of the man himself, someone who was willing to look at the world in a very different way and to put in place many highly advanced communications capabilities that the rest of the world is just beginning to appreciate in full. Here we are today bubbling about the wonders of "markets as conversations" while Renfrew made it a reality with online conversational dealing systems twenty years ago. Like most young executives at Reuters I had to do a presentation to Renfrew when he visited our local office. I came prepared to the nines, slides in hand, walked into the conference room, reached across the table to shake his hand - and tripped over the electrical cord for the slide projector in the process. Well, it happens. But what was interesting was the look in Renfrew's eyes when I gathered myself up from the floor. He had been there, you knew. Carry on, John, the eyes seemed to say, I'd like to hear what you're about. And so I did carry on. He asked very intelligent and honest questions and seemed to be a truly appreciative man. Humility and vision do not always go hand in hand, but for a period of time there was a major publisher that was blessed by a man who had both. Hats off, all, the Baron has passed.
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:24 AM |
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David Carr at The New York Times interviews Gawker Media impresario Nick Denton in the wake of Denton's somewhat sour comments on weblogs at last week's ContentNext mixer, focusing on his culling of Gawker Media's portfolio of weblogs and shuffling of management. Carr's observation: gee, this is just like a regular media company, isn't it. Unh-huh. I don't think that it's any secret that the Gawker portfolio was designed from its outset to be a high-flying set of media properties, not built around any one particular personality (even Wonkette alter ego Ana Marie Cox proved to be expendable) but around pumping out content that could sustain a robust revenue stream. To that end, many of these properties focus (obsess?) on the usual mass media stuff: sex, toys, cuss words and gossip. Not exactly long tail stuff, for the most part. It's fine and admirable that Denton and others have figured out how to leverage a new publishing technology for profit and there's no shame in applying long-valid lessons from publishing to making their properties successful mass media ventures. But the current "bubble" posing by many who stem from the old "new media" crowd seems in large part to be sour grapes over a new landscape in publishing that favors those who don't get invited to industry parties as much as those who do. Put simply, there are oodles of content producers, both individuals and non-media corporations, who have different measurements for success in publishing and who don't really care whether the party is there or not. I think of navigation skills as a corollary: not long ago you had to be pretty darn good with manipulating some very rarefied instruments to get from point "A" to point "B" in a ship or airplane. Today with GPS receivers any one with a few hundred dollars can know within a few paces where they are and where they should be going. That doesn't mean that hundreds of people are lining up to become professional navigators, but it does mean that there are a world of people who move about with far more confidence than ever before. So a round of full applause for the Nick Dentons of the world who have figured out how to apply traditional media lessons to a new publishing medium - and a fuller round to those who are content to communicate with focused communities with or without a crowd of elbow-rubbers to admire them.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:40 AM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:38 AM |
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| Tuesday, July 04, 2006 |
Local Holiday (U.S. Independence Day)
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:44 PM |
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| Monday, July 03, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:17 PM |
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Where to people go to get today's headlines online? For many it's not a news portal but the front pages of weblogs that crib little snippets of stories that are breaking (or have yet to break) on the major news sites. The hunger to be first with a story in print is not being reconciled efficiently with the realities of online news, which favor those who keep their eyes open for breaking news from all sources agnostically. News organizations have an opportunity to define premium services in this mix - and to consider how they can become the "go to" destinations for people wanting a first edition of today's headlines from a world of authoritative sources. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:38 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 12:14 AM |
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