Only Dead Fish

Making Content Pay

 

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"We're not going from a world of Business Model A to one of Business Model B, we're going from Business Model A to Business Models A to Z." Clay Shirky

Every now and then you read a post that really stays with you. In early January last year, Ian Rogers (ex Head of Music at Yahoo and now CEO at Topspin media) gave an account of his talk to the CAA music industry conference in Aspen. It was one of those 'wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee' kind of presentations, but it contained loads of nuggets that I've referred to again and again ever since. 

Like Ian, my view of the future of media is an optimistic one. Like him, I think that what's happening in media (and music) is full of change but is also full of opportunity. Ian talks a lot about ubiquity and scarcity, and refers to a deck that Umair Haque put up on Bubblegeneration all the way back in 2005 in which he writes about how mass media captures value from scarcity - particularly scarcity of distribution (costs of broadcasting, transportation, inventory) and retail (limited shelf/screen space, spectrum scarcity) - and how if old media was about 'blockbusters', then new media is about 'snowballs'.

In the Blockbuster world, says Ian (and Umair), there’s a point where investing more in quality delivers diminishing returns and marketing delivers the audience:

"If you are making Pirates of the Carribean 12, do you spend $2M extra dollars on that actress or on getting Johnny Depp’s face on the cups at Burger King? Burger King, of course, you’re not trying to make the best movie in the world, you’re just trying to get people to go to theatre A instead of theatre B this week"

In the Snowball world however the opposite is the case - there's a point at which you get diminishing returns from spending more on marketing, especially when attention is the scarcity, but quality is "hyper-efficient". If something is good enough, people will see it.

The relevance of all this to making money from content is right there in that balance between ubiquity and scarcity. Quality and relevance have never been more important - as Ian says: "Our jobs are still the same...making stuff people love". Making content ubiqitous - making it easy to find, scalable, portable - enables it to be spreadable (as opposed to 'viral') and act as cultural material for people's own conversations. The sweet spot is where content meets context.

Ubiquity gives you the platform from which you can create a new kind scarcity, and creating scarcity is important because when something is scarce it has value. Ian talks about the 'digital packaging' of music. Scott Karp talks about how media owners need to be experimenting with new ways of packaging content:

"An individual content item on the web, without a package, has marginal value approaching zero - and attempting to charge for an individual item of content is unlikely to change that. What you CAN charge for is the package."

This is not about applying print subscription models to digital content. It's likely not putting up pay-walls around existing content either (at least not without adding other value of some kind). Its a new kind of scarcity. The kind that adds value, rather than subtracting it. The kind that is more enabling than it is restricting. What I'm talking about is turning content into a service. About how you apply producer expertise in new ways. About making content useful as well as entertaining. If it is of sufficient value, people will pay for it.

As Gareth has pointed out before, culture is what we all compete with for people's time. Which is partly why, I suspect, a lot of focus is going on trying to crack THE model, or THE idea that will change the world. But to quote Clay Shirky "Culture is a huge thing to be worried about...there's only one thing that you can posit as almost universal: Start small and experiment from there...you can affect culture in a small way". What Mark calls 'lighting lots of fires'. One thing's for sure though - it ain't nothing without the platform.

Bots And People

 
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"Ask yourself this: do you think Wikipedia ever hired an SEO consultant in order to get its high rankings on Google?" Jeremy Keith

I posted this quote (via armandoalves) over on the Tumblr the other day because it makes such a good point about the rounded benefits of good, people focused content.

There are of-course many ways to attract people to content (notice I didn't say 'drive traffic'), not least by ensuring it is as well marked-up and relevant as possible (what Jeremy calls 'optimising for people'). But whilst many owners and producers spend an awful lot of time, money and effort focused on optimising their content for Google bots and algorithms, the inherent value that socialised content has for search and referrals through its associated richness of in-bound links, is often forgotten.

Similarly, many owners and producers underestimate the value that socially distributed content (what you might call 'social syndication'), and socially based personalisation, has for getting your content in front of more people.

The real game changer here of-course is Facebook Connect. Facebook now accounts for 1 in every 7 page views in the UK. It may still be second to Google in terms of visits, but it accounts for over twice the share of UK page views (14.5% compared to 5.8%, and, as James has so eloquently pointed out, has a level of user trust and scale that has enabled a richness of data like nothing we've ever seen before).

Earlier this week Gordon posted on how The Huffington Post (which has just surpassed The Washington Post in scale and is now second only to USA Today and the New York Times) has used a wider breadth of content combined with social tools based on Facebook Connect that allow users to personalise as well as comment on and share content easily with Facebook friends, to increase its unique users by 50% year on year. Its worth noting that underneath that headline figure, Facebook referral traffic is up 48% and 15% of all comments on HuffPo now come from Facebook.

Similarly, many owners and producers underestimate the value of a distributed but engaged community in attracting referrals. When it was announced that SamFry (the company that manages Stephen Fry's website) were launching their network of celebrity sites earlier this week, the co-Managing Director Andrew Sampson talked about the huge surges in traffic that come as a direct result of Fry's tweets and blogs. Not surpising perhaps, given that at time writing he has over 885,000 followers on twitter. But Sampson used an example, saying that when Fry had tweeted the URL to his "Poles, Politeness and Politics in the age of Twitter" post earlier this week, the site had received five times the number of daily vistors which typically averages about 1.1m unique users. If every single one of Fry's followers had followed the link, it wouldn't have even doubled the number of visitors. I'm not advocating that Twitter should be used as a glorified RSS feed, but when a piece of content like that spreads, it really spreads. And if it doesn't spread it's dead.

Kate Moss & Me

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In all the hoo-ha yesterday about online advertising taking a bigger slice of the ad pie than TV in the UK (yes it's a big deal in the sense that its the first major market for this to happen, but let's understand the context - the online figures are driven by the beast that is search advertising (aka Google) and incorporate many myriad forms of online marketing whereas the TV ad figures are just, well, TV advertising) the to-ing and fro-ing about whether TV was bigger than online completely missed the point. That this kind of comparison is largely irrelevant.

But it's a good example of our continued obsession with scale. It reminds me of the perennial headlines about which national newspaper website is biggest this week - yawn. Scale is everything in broadcast. Broadcast thinking assumptively groups large numbers of people together based on socio-demographics or 'likelihood' to behave in a certain way. A viewer is a viewer. An opportunity to see is an opportunity to see. The more you have of them the better it is.

But scale is far from everything online. Its very easy to generalise on the web. It's very big. There are a lot of people. Lots of websites. Lots of stuff. So lots of people do generalise. Broadcast thinking on the web chases the big numbers. A user is a user. An impression is an impression. A click through a click through. It groups things together for the sake of efficiency. Scale equals revenue because a page impression results in at least one ad impression which can be monetised, even if it is at ridiculously low cost per thousand rates. So we chase impressions and we chase eyeballs. And this is how we judge value.

If you want this kind of scale, it's not hard to get it. Let me give you an example. Hundreds of people visit this blog everyday (thanks for stopping by). Most of them come here because they seem to like what I do and want to read and interact (at least that's what it looks like from the stats). Some posts are more read than others. One of my most visited posts is one I that wrote about Chuck Close. Why? Not because of some insightful observation I've made on the merits of photo-realism . It's because it has a picture of Kate Moss on it (from Chuck Close's excellent Family and Others exhibition) that Google images has indexed. Much as it pains me to say it, people are arriving at that post because of Kate Moss, not because of me (admittedly she is slightly better looking than I am). So, if you want lots of that kind of traffic, stick a pic of Kate Moss up. Or write posts with lots of lists in them called 'Top 50 awesome ways with CSS'. Or something.

The point is, how valuable is that traffic? I mean, really? How many of the people who arrive on websites because they are searching for a specific piece of information, or image, are going to stick around? How many of them are going to come back again? The internet is a does medium, which means there is a wide range of interaction from passionate involvement to none at all. So the people who are of most value to any content owner are those who are most engaged in what you're doing (for me that means those that have stopped by because they are interested to read and comment on what I'm saying, or the many more people that have taken the trouble to subscribe to the feed).

It's the difference between creating a platform, and chasing eyeballs. It's delivering real value, and getting real value in return. And guess what? A user is not a user, they are a person.

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Continous Partial Media Attention

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Gareth's post about MP3s and the peak attention thing reminded me of these three sobering stats (from here) concerning media multitasking (or should I say continuous partial attention):

• 36% of UK broadband users (aged 16-55) state they have both the TV and Internet on in the same room every day. On weekdays the time when TV and internet multi-tasking is most likely to happen is around 8pm in the evening. TNS/YouTube Media & Audience Study (broadband users aged 16-55), December 2008

• Over 25% of internet users surveyed in the UK, FR, DE, IT, US, and Japan in October 2008 said they go onto the internet at the same time as watching TV "most of the time".Ofcom, November 2008
• People aged 12-24 are notching up 23 cumulative hours a day, engaged in up to five activities simultaneously.NMA, April 2009

Simultaneous media use is not a new story. But a number of studies have shown that it is a relatively (and perhaps unsurprisingly) widespread phenomenon that is becoming more prevalent, and that some media are more prone to be consumed concurrently with other media than others. I don't know about you but if I sit and watch telly, I am often online (or doing something else) at the same time. Seems I'm not the only one. I'm not picking on TV here, but I guess it bothers me slightly that the subject isn't talked about more. It's surely a quite fundamental behavioural change in how we consume media (and advertising). The way in which billions of pounds of media are planned and bought relies on good old reach and frequency metrics that are based on opportunities to see. But if that opportunity is much less of an opportunity (or at least a different type of opportunity) than it once was, perhaps we ought to take account of that. Reach is one thing. Attention is another. Anyone else?

The Irrelevance Of Digital

There's been a few things I've read recently questioning the relevance of the word 'digital' in marketing, suggesting that in light of the digitisation of all media it is losing its meaning, that the days of specialism are over.

I think Marc Cridge is right when he says that 'digital' played to a different set of rules, and that social has now changed the game again, and that "you can’t simply take the old ways of doing things and apply them to any new medium in exactly the same way".

But I also think that the distinction we make is getting less meaningful. And as I've said before, people don't think in channels, they think in terms of entertainment, information, enjoyment, usefulness - being able to get what they want, when they want it. As content becomes unhinged from legacy devices, as media 'channels' become blurrier, so the separation between 'platforms' becomes less and less tangible.

As Mark Anderson has said, content is already at the point where it has few or no boundaries, where it is provisioned for every device, where it is increasingly less defined by its 'platform', and in that way becoming more invisible. By expanding, the web disappears.

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Russell made the point that this all gets really interesting (or scary, depending on your point of view) as more products start emiting data streams, as objects start communicating and get more informationally connected, and that this is what advertising and marketing and media people really need to get afeared by: "All this web stuff is going to look like a picnic compared to the horrors that will be dealt to the agency and media businesses when every product has a communications channel built right in."

To quote William Gibson: 'One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real'

And yet the majority of advertising content is still provisioned by channel, media is planned and bought by channel, and I agree with John - it often seems that common sense is not so common. Or put another way, we can't afford to take for granted that the things that we take for granted are taken for granted by everyone else. If that sounds a little pompous, I don't mean it to. But the point again is that the view from inside the world of advertising and media is not necessarily the same as that outside of it.

I don't have the answer. But I suspect that the question ain't going away anytime soon.

Social Interfaces

Touchwall Demo from Joel on Vimeo.

For those not lucky enough to get to Cannes this year (me included), Schematic debuted a 12ft by 5ft intelligent, multi-user "Touchwall" designed to help delegates get the most from the event. As well as RFID technology that allowed the wall to recognise individual delegates, there were 3D maps, meeting scheduling, personalised workspaces and so on.

It looks impressive enough, but I think the really interesting thing about this (which is touched on in the video, along with the inevitable Minority Report comparison) is the fact that tangible interfaces of this kind are "social by nature" with multiple people working side-by-side meaning that it can foster communication not only through the screen, but in front of it as well. With the socialisation of both enterprise tools and media, it's easy to imagine the potential for both interactive out-of-home and the world of work. Nice.

Invisibility And Context

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Invisibility is an odd goal to have. We're so used to shouting for attention that the idea of going wholly in the opposite direction feels plain wrong. But I think in some ways it's an interesting objective.

It's interesting for media. People don't think in channels, they think of content, and accessing that content whenever and wherever is convenient for them. So content needs to be enabled to move seamlessly across platforms so that it is easy to find, easy to interact with, easy to share. As soon as this is your starting point, it becomes increasingly irrelevant to think in terms of channels.

As what Faris calls the "modalities of media" continue to blur, it makes less and less sense for example, to talk about 'being online. Content becomes portable, unhinged from legacy devices, provisioned for every device.

So it is with technology:

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What Kevin Kelly talks about is technology so immersed in everyday life that it is ubiquitous, essential, but invisible. Like the alphabet.

So it's curious that whilst the notion of 'channels' disappears, context is taking on a whole new meaning. We've always had the where, the when and the how of media. Now we have a whole bunch more where, when and how, and a great big who. It's a point made nicely in this presentation by Helge Tennø :

"It's about people, and the stuff that happens between them."

Context Marketing, arenas, utilities and the convergence of them

View more presentations from Helge Tennø.

The Mobile Future

I went to the Future of Content and Creativity event at the RSA on Wednesday. Gerd Leonhard gave a great talk (I've seen him a few times before and he's always good) about content, copyright and control, including some good points on the change in thinking needed in content payment models. Also on the bill was Richard Titus (currently Controller, Future Media, Audio & Music and Mobile at the BBC, but soon to take the helm at Associated). Richard's framing of the new environment was very good. Three key points for me:

1. Rapid commoditization of technology into open standards means that user experience becomes the key differentiator, and live event-driven information and data become the true premium content
2. There are only 3 ways to monetize content and services: subscription, transaction and sponsorship. There may be multiple variations on these themes but this, is essentially, it.
3. As consumptive behaviours mutate, the line between active and passive continues to blur, on-demand vs live barriers disappear, time-shifting vs place shifting. He gave a current example. When the BBC launched the i-player onto mobile, they noticed some odd consumption habits which appeared to indicate a spike in mobile viewing late in the evening. When they looked into this, they discovered that this was because people were using the mobile i-player as a second television to view TV in bed.

The Mobile Future - RSA

View more presentations from R Titus.

Getting Wired

Day one of the UK edition of Wired. So I bought a copy. And to be honest it was pretty good. Highlights included Russell's column ("I'd like to suggest that multitasking and distraction aren't the enemy - they're what makes us human and creative - and...we should be building software tools that distract us more, not help us to concentrate"). And knowing my prediliction for them, Ramzi Yakob had already let me know that there were some good data visualisations in the launch issue on the size of the internet connections between the planets major cities (thanks Ramzi). I really hope it succeeds. But of-course, as Ramzi also asks, the real question is this:

8 Million People, One Smart Strategy

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According to a new index published by Technorati, the New York Times is the second most linked to site by bloggers. Unsurprising you might think, given their news and opinion driven content. But it may just be that this is as much the result of a interesting programme of change being spearheaded by the Interactive Newsroom Technologies group in the Times - a group of "developers-slash-journalists, or journalists-slash-developers" who work across a broad scope of the organisation on both short-term and long-term projects to evolve and reinvent.

Part of what they're doing is about the kind of social optimisation I talked about below. Layers of interactivity, involvement, share-ability. Part of it is about a new kind of journalism. New ways of reporting and representing news and information. Data visualisations. Backstories. Generating talkability by reflecting back to the audience what we are all talking about, or how we feel. The benefit of all this is obvious - talkability, spreadable media, link generation, SEO benefit. It's very smart.

One in 8 million is yet another great example. A storytelling project reflecting the fact that New York is a "305-square-mile parade of people with something to say". A collection of "passions and problems, relationships and routines, vocations and obsessions". I love this sort of stuff. It's exactly what they should be doing. And look at that. I've just linked to the New York Times again.