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March 28, 2024

Partnering Means Getting Beyond the Alien Moment

Important Details: With all the activity announced and in the works, the SIIA Content Division’s session on "Successful Deals with Google and Yahoo, held last week in New York City, was timely. Discussion of actual, successful partnerships was meager. But in panelists’ remarks, Outsell sensed a sharpening definition of business models as publishers and search aggregators learn each other’s businesses.

Stephen Baker best illuminated those roles. That’s probably because Baker is a true tweener of the digital content age. He recently moved into the newly created position of CEO of Reed Business Search. On his resume are exec stints at Fast Search and Transfer and at Yahoo’s Overture paid search unit. So now he’s come to a prime content player, and he’s bringing both the portal search experience and the technology chops.

"We have 250 publications, [we do] 500 events and 900 sites," Baker said, referring to Reed Business’s breadth. "I have more taxonomies than I know what to do with." So Baker’s new task is to bring order, even simplicity, to all that complexity — and to maximize its monetization. He is throwing out a wide net — first focusing on 30 top verticals — beyond Reed Business content to other like vertical content customers will want.

In Baker’s case, he wants less to do GYM deals than to emulate those companies. "We’re creating a Google for B2B search. Content is the glue to get [the customers] in the community. Search is at the core." Baker says offering search and following its metrics is about one thing: watching. But of course then there’s the unspoken: improving relevance and usability, finding the right revenue levers — continuously.

The Associated Press’s Jane Seagrave, vice president of new media markets, focused mainly on her company’s summer license agreement with Google. She offered this insight: "We understand our content better than the search engines. The big ah-ha is that we as news providers were scared of the algorithm." Now she believes the search algorithms, properly fed and deployed, are a way forward. "This [content handling] will be done well enough that we won’t have to worry about it."

Not that the learning was easy. While "Yahoo has folks from traditional backgrounds, Google was different," said Seagrave. "It was like meeting with aliens." But over time she and her Google counterparts learned enough of each other’s jargon and culture, and put together a deal.

Andrew Madden, a strategic partnership director at Google, ironically talked about his own culture shock. "I learned to understand a little geek," after moving to the search giant after work in web journalism. Madden said his group was trying anew to match up its own staff with would-be partners, so that the communication wouldn’t be so tough.

Panel moderator Steve Sieck, an Outsell vice president and senior consultant, poked at that sore point in the industry — the difficulty of communicating with Google. While he couldn’t get much of a rise out of the assemblage, Madden made it clear he’d heard the sentiment before. His panel presence and that of Tanya Singer, director of product management at Yahoo Finance, signaled a new attempt to reach out to traditional publishers.

In Outsell’s Opinion: Everyone’s joked about the generation gap between GYM execs and publishers. The acceleration though of decline in print businesses has meant that there are fewer laughs to enjoy. In Outsell’s opinion, the further injection of well-experienced Web DNA, like Reed Business’s Stephen Baker, into strong content businesses is essential. It’s not just a matter of hiring lower-level techies; it’s about game-changers.

In addition, the persistence of content managers, like Seagrave, and GYM managers, like Madden and Singer, to see through difficult agreements is key. Publishers have too often walked away from the table, or never quite gotten there, in frustration. Persistence, learning the language, learning the culture — these are all features business people talk about in going global. They are the same skills needed at home, as generations, technologies, and business models find common ground.

To thrive in the years ahead, B2B Trade Publishers can find much-needed incremental revenue using agile publishing techniques. Outsell’s BrainGain(SM) event on December 6 will cover “how-tos” for leveraging agile publishing to:

• Match content to the “where, what, how, and when” of readers’ needs
• Create metrics that strengthen audience focus and drive segmentation
• Bond with users by feeding content directly into their day-in and day-out workflow applications