Publishers Herald Move to Social- and Company-Generated Content Creation
Important Details: Speakers at SIIA’s annual Information Industry Summit offered some insights into the tectonic changes — advertising model shifts, company-created content, user-generated content, niching — underway as the year begins. A few highlights:
- On the heels of significant layoffs and the sale of 18 titles, Time, Inc. CEO Ann Moore laid out her magazine division’s new strategy. In a nutshell, her presentation was a familiar one to Web observers. Rather than managing 100+ magazine titles, each with its own culture, business development and strategy, she’s reorganized along topical lines. The topics are ones that fit reader and advertiser tastes on the ebb — news, celebrity/entertainment, sports, business/finance, home and health. She recounted the woes of the magazine industry — readership, fewer supermarket vists for impulse buying, ad competition — and emphasized how the company is building digital products on its biggest brands, with People.Com a focal point of Web and mobile efforts, for instance. One slide Moore showed that shone a light on the size of the mountain ahead: the company earns $118 annually per each of its 3.2 million print subscribers while picking up only $5 per each of its 6.8 million unique web visitors. Moore said the company sees a major opportunity in health, noting that WebMD nor anyone else had yet come to dominate the category. She also announced a partnership with Google, which will digitize Life Magazine’s iconic photos from 1936 onward, opening up several new monetization models around advertising and re-use. At week’s end, Moore’s aggressiveness in user content was evident as well, as her Sports Illustrated group bought the FanNation website and Time itself bought an interest in Sports Technologies, Inc, its parent company.
- On the nexus of user-generated content and new business, IT Toolbox CEO Dan Morrison made the connection crystal clear: "Communication becomes product." Morrison says his IT community creates 1500 pages of new content every day.
- On "who will own what," Jim Friedlich, a partner in Zelnick Media, made the point that in each media transformation, the legacy companies often become the owners of the new guys. In the couple of years ahead: "It’s a time of Gulliver Media — giants waking up. We’ll see more consolidation."
- On publishers ability to more effectively deal with "fair use" of their content by search aggregation companies like Google, copyright attorney Thomas Kirby made the point that their case is best supported to the extent that publishers show they themselves can monetize headlines and summaries. He said that Agence France Presse’s copyright infringement case has been helped by AFP’s ability to show how it is beginning to make a business of selling headlines and briefs for mobile use.
- On companies becoming publishers and controlling their own messages, Colleen DeCourcy, the chief experience officer at JWT agency, talked about her experience with Ford becoming its own publisher. "We decided we would call it brand journalism." She was seconded by her co-panelist, Ben Edwards, who directs new media for IBM. "IBM is full of great stories and you have to discover how to tell them. The narrative used to be in the hands of professional journalists. Now I can tell IBM’s story from IBM"s point of view…..The audience knows we’re partial. They come to their own conclusions and evaluations." Edwards also said the company had made wiki, blogging and podcast tools "available to 308,000 IBMers." Marketwatch’s Bambi Francisco said she believed corporate web publishing was a major trend, saying she thought that "2007 would be the year of corporate video."
- On the confluence of enterprise and consumer markets, Dow Jones Enterprise group head Clare Hart put it simply: "What you are using in your consumer life, you will be using in your business life." Hart also emphasized that the teenagers of today, multitasking with IM, MySpace, YouTube, school and family, will be the enterprise users of tomorrow — and will expect to be able to use a similar suite of tools in their business lives.
- On changing transacting–and its impact on advertising, Patrick Kenealy, managing general partner of IDG Ventures Pacific, predicted that in five years, "We’ve eliminated waste. You’ll see only the ads you’re interested in."
In Outsell’s Opinion: The conference and its speakers are a good reminder of how fundamental — not incremental — are the shifting business models in front of all publishers. From the very basics — content is coming from many places other than journalists — to the nuances of verticalization, segmentation, and monetization, it’s clear that there is little business-as-usual going on at publishers that will be in the industry’s future winners. The items above (and some access to conference video) are good conversation starters for those in the news industry, to help stoke the fires of innovative movement.