Colin's Corner

What Must Media Executives Do Today to be a Force in the Future

Yesterday I attended the Clickability Digital Strategies Event as a panelist yesterday in NYC – while we covered a lot on the panel Executive Best Practices: What Must Media Executives Do Today to be a Force in the Future?"– time prevented us getting to all the questions so here are some fuller answers. 

Q 1) What will your company look like in five years and what are you doing NOW to prepare?

A. 5 years is a remarkable short period of time – esp. when we think that even with the speed of change in the Internet space many companies are still debating some of the transitions – the impact of search, social media, disintermediation, syndication. It takes a long time – often retirement or death is needed to change attitudes!

While there are major disruptions – there are a number of obvious trends – these are not new – we’ve observed them for a couple of decades.  Analogue to digital – everything is going to digital (even if the final output is analogue) we’re seeing media complement each other – plus there’s a movement to digital + analogue.  Major themes and trends include engagement of communities and social media, content curation and filtering, hyper-local, targeting, mobility – personalization, LBS.

Over the next few years, I think most media companies will be more comfortable with both the uniqueness of their print, online and mobile products – the specific benefits each one offers but also how they can all work together – there will be more integration across organizations.

What works best in print does not necessarily translate well online and similarly replicating a web site on mobile devices is a poor idea!.

Organizations needs to flexible, have an agile approach, some of the wisdom that comes with experience has to be meshed with youthful innovation and a willingness to experiment. So one of the most important investments a company can make is in its people and their training.

With the economic challenges of today – there will be a tendency to reduce perceived short-term risk – to be too conservative  – when in fact there is a real danger that in-action will jeopardize the future. Unless companies properly plan for the medium and long-term – when the economy improves – they could find themselves at competitive disadvantages from new more agile entrants – those who can utilize the latest technologies and approaches. Keep hiring yoiung!

Certain job functions will be seen as critical – audience development, data analysis, social community interaction, content curation rather than just a focus on original content, UI and UX expertise. The new generation of content creators will need to be more comfortable with creating enhanced content environments using multiple media formats. That will take time.

We’ll see more pragmatism – consolidations, partnerships, and joint ventures – the current approach of many companies is to win a Pyrrhic  victory – the devastating cost of winning is so high it’s not worth it.  The media industry is notorious for its egotism, siloed approach and un-cooperative tactics – I’ve had experience in running a successful JV between two of the most competitive organizations – IDG and Ziff Davis – it was the right thing to do at the time and everyone benefited – the owners, the advertisers and the readers. JVs are not long-term institutions but can work well for a short period.

Q 2) Where/how are you investing now for the future?

        A. My advice to companies is to invest in a number of areas – first people, education and training. We operate in a very fast paced dynamic environment - it’s largely a people business so you need the right skills – even if money is tight – there are a lot of very bright college kids who are willing to apprentice through intern programs. Use alternative resources – for example work with local colleges to have classes analyze new business models, design new web pages or iPhone apps – great training for the students and not only can you get great ideas but also some talented future employees.

Plumbing – analytics and metrics and research are critical – data is the new oil – you have to know how your audiences are engaging with your content.  Conduct ongoing research on customer satisfaction.

Outsourcing certain technologies I’d think very hard about outsourcing some (not all) technologies to the cloud – especially in the commodity areas and keep internal those that need flexibility, customization and are considered mission critical.  Rent don’t buy today’s equivalent of the “printing presses”.

User data collection and audience development - Databases are critical assets and are competitive barriers to entry. Of course, taking into careful consideration, the appropriate and transparent issues of privacy and TOS – collect email and mobile numbers on opt-in basis. Build ways to constantly engage with your audiences.

UI / UX  - print generally is designed extremely well from a UI perspective – we’ve had a lot of experience – however, well-designed websites and mobile environments are the exception not the rule. Try reading the digital replicas of newspapers on your laptop. Try to navigate a web page that scrolls for 10-20 pages crammed with links, ads and anything but the content you want or a mobile app that overwhelms you with features. What are your user satisfaction scores and how are they trending? 

Q 3) What emerging business models are sustainable or simply transitory?

A. I’m a supporter of the theory of evolution –all business models evolve – they have to, nothing stays the same nor should it.  Competition drives innovation – and the weaker species become extinct. The advertising models of traditional print publishing (esp. newspapers) are under huge economic pressure due to technological shifts. Publishers in the US in particular have for too long been dependant on advertising as the principle source of revenue – undermining the value of content – training users to expect it for free rather than emphasizing it’s value. Looking ahead advertising has to be positioned as a real customer benefit not an unnecessary interruption.

What’s hot what’s not!

-The status quo is not sustainable – agility and experimentation is We’re in unchartered territory - Going forwards we’ll see massive amounts of experimentation – you have to be willing to fail – even fail spectacularly – the wipe-out is an education, a learning experience! 

There will be different advertising and paid content models, different paid services – the winners will be those who are agile, willing to experiment and not be satisfied with the status quo. There is no panacea – no “right” answer – the paid models of WSJ and FT may be totally inappropriate for local newspapers. The economics of markets, audiences, content varies considerably – you know your audiences – what works for them? You have to have a customer centric not publisher centric philosophy. Observe, learn and adapt keep close to your customers and understand your markets.

There has to be a better balance between advertising and paid content and services than we’ve seen over the last few decades.  Keep a close eye on the tests coming out of News Corp. They are very serious about paid content models.

        - Generality is less sustainable than specificity - The specific pushes out the general– so we’ll see more and more a world of “hyper-local” – geography, topics and audiences.

        - Free alone is not sustainable but free to paid can be – I think Chris Anderson, gets somewhat misunderstood – free is a driver.  Free can be a catalyst to drive to paid products – online can drive to a paid print product – especially if the product benefits are clearly articulated.

        - Interruption is not sustainable – customer engagement is.  General online CPM advertising will remain under pressure – targeted advertising, behavioral, customer interaction and engagement will gain traction.  Privacy issues will continue to be a concern and publishers must be extremely transparent about what data is being collected and how it is used.

        - Ownership of (most) products – books, magazine, music, movies is not sustainable (except in niche categories) rental and subscription models are. Apple may disagree but Pandora gets my subscription when it could go to an Apple iTune subscription.

        -  Push only models are not sustainable – pull models that involve the audiences are - importance of social media will only increase – engagement, attention, recommendations and trust are key issues

        - Anonymous posting are not sustainable, personal reputation and strong user centric identities are.

        - There is a new mass media and it is mobility – whole range of mobile devices are on the way – (btw I don’t see the e-reader as mass market mainstream device) the smartphone is defining a new mass media. Mobile Social, Mobile Search, LBS services (Yelp as an example) will be key drivers. Publishers should to be developing mobile strategies.

        - Physical or digital alone is not sustainable - The physical and digital world will link via “augmented reality" through the in-phone camera

        - Cost of developing certain original content has to reduce – the digital economics will not support the current models – publishers will have to focus and differentiate – As noted by Jeff Jarvis - do what you do best and link the rest. Great content is expensive and hard to produce – all the more reason to price it appropriately

Q 4) What are the international and global opportunities for media? 

        A. Given previous years of experience at IDG – I’m a huge supporter of an international strategy for media – but it has to be managed carefully. Think global but act local.  Many sites in the US see 30-40% of their traffic coming from outside the US – that can be viewed as “wasted traffic” that is hard to monetize – or it can be viewed as a great opportunity – for example a B2B company in the US – collecting lead generation information from most US visitors could partner with a European partner to find a way to monetize the traffic

Q 5) In the next 5 years where do you see media consolidation?

A. Across the whole industry – there is just too much commodity content that cannot be monetized  –but I also see more fragmentation as self publishing becomes easier and the promotional power of the social web is better utilized for marketing, search and discovery

Q 6) As leaders, how do you quickly evolve companies that may be entrenched in outdated paradigms?

A. It takes a long time to change a culture.

Focus on the people – understand where they fall – from the early adopters to the laggards and even potential (often unintentional) saboteurs. Push continuous training and education and keep getting a perspective from outside your company – even from outside your industry can be stimulating.

Q 7) Describe the digital executive of the future?

A. I don’t think the leadership qualities of a digital executive are really any different from any other good leader. I’d look for a customer and market focused visionary and strategist,who embraces knowledge from multiple sources, synthesizes it and then clearly lays out the destination ahead.

An individual who understands the value of the human talent in the organization and is willing to properly invest in the best and the brightest but is also quickly willing to move aside thosewho resist appropriate change.

Someone who places a very high value on the product that is being produced

Someone who runs a very agile and efficient organization- who pushes the organization to take some risk but mitigates that risk by a deep understanding of customer and market needs – even when the customers may not be able to articulate it themselves.

 

In the long term the mobile web will beat out mobile apps

When the Yahoo directory launched it was a great way to showcase some of the best web sites - but with exponential growth of web pages - it could not keep up and search replaced the browse function. The growth of the apps stores, the fact that they are being so "controlled" means that there must be a similar change in the current model. When the iPhone launched, developers had to build web apps - but the web browser was not sophisticated enough. With the launch of the iPhone SDK we saw the surge of iphone apps, aided by Apple's iTunes distribution and payment systems. However, the problems over search and discovery, inconsistent approval procedures, arbitrary rejects, a reviews system that can be gamed and an awful search and discovery process is leaving developers and customers disillusioned. Google sees the opportunity to try and own the mobile browser and the development of apps within the browser. Sure, it's not there yet and will take a number of years to flush out but the directional indicators are pretty clear. Apps stores have some short term advantages but go long on the mobile browser. Certain segments such as mobile banking will never develop mobile apps because of security issues, esp caching. Banks and finance institutions will develop apps in the mobile browser and wrap them in an App skin to get maximum distribution but their focus is all on the mobile browser. Apple's success with the Apps store may blind them to the mobile browser opportunities. However, the recent moves by Google many give them significant pause for thought.

The media industry continues on a bumpy road to digital revenues.

The mood at the Allen & Co Sun Valley Media Conference was generally somber as the moguls at the Davos-esque media summit continue to struggle with the monetization in the digital media world.

During the conference, Rupert Murdoch noted in an interview with Fox Business that News Corp was very unlikely to produce it's own e-reader. Stating:

"I  don’t think that’s likely. We’re looking and talking to a lot of laboratories and big companies around the world like Sony, Fujitsu, Samsung. We’re all working on wireless readers for books or for newspapers or for magazines. I think they’re a year or two away, being marketed in a mass way, high quality ones. And we will be absolutely neutral. We’re very happy to have our products distributed over any device provided it’s only going to subscribers who are paying for it."

The decision not to build a device but instead to work with many partners seems a really smart one. Maybe some other newspaper companies, such as Hearst with their investment in FirstPaper, will rethink their plans.

Yet more e-readers were announced this week including the Ditto Book and the Bookeen Cybook Opus.  There are currently around 40 different e-ink devices with, no doubt, plenty more to come before the inevitable shake out. Such competition will speed the price reductions that are necessary if the e-reader is to move from a niche to mass market product.

Amazon - recognizing the growing competition in the e-reader market, cut the price on its Kindle 2 device by $60 (17%) from $359 to $299. 

However, different approaches to screen technology such as the one from Pixel Qi to redesign the LCD screen could change the whole landscape as this technology finds its way into netbooks, notebooks and tablets reducing the need for a separate e-reader device.  

Publishers continue to fret about Amazon's dominance of the e-book distribution market, according to a recent Bloomberg report. While concerns over the power of Amazon and the pressure on margins are justified - traditional book publishers still have to do much more to radiacally change their business structures to deal with the inevitable shift to digital. Certain book publishers appear to be embracing the move to digital faster than others. 

As e-publishers look to additional revenue streams, we're likely to see advertising in e-books in the foreseeable future following Amazon's patent application for contextually sensitive embedded advertising.  

Amazon was also in the news with the launch of a new special store called Amazon Wireless  — it will be competing against Let's Talk . The online store will sell wireless service plans and devices from U.S. carriers AT&T and Verizon Wireless. Sprint and T-Mobile USA are coming soon. The sale of the iPhone is not suported 

 

The week ahead has a number of key mobile events: 

IAB Marketplace Mobile will be held on July 13th in NYC and will focus on mobile marketing and advertising. The event follows on the heels of a report from the IAB UK that indicates the majority of consumer are willing to embrace mobile advertising

On July 14th also in NYC, the Online Publishers Association is hosting a members only OPA Mobile Day presenting updated research on the mobile marketplace.

And on July 16th in San Francisco, MobileBeat2009 gathers 400 mobile developers, executives, entrepreneurs, marketers and press to discuss the future of mobile technology.

The journey to digital - online and mobile, continues at a rapid pace even if the road ahead is not always well signposted.

Apps store delivers results for Apple but outlook less clear for developers

Apple's iPhone App Store celebrated its first year in business and while wildly successful for Apple, it has suffered from inconsistencies in the approval process . It's also hard for most apps to be found. To assist, Macworld recently launched a comprehensive App Guide  to help the challenges of discovering the gems among 60,000+ apps. The size of the iPhone economy was highlighted by a recent report from ChubbyBrain showing than over $100M has been invested by VCs in 17 iPhone Apps companies.

In a clearly overly simplistic analysis to drive home a point - if you estimate that it costs on $25,000 on average to develop a paid iPhone app, given there are over 45,000 paid apps in the store - that represents over $1 BN in investment costs. However, assuming a generous 10% of all the apps downloaded are paid for - at 1 billion downloads with an average revenue of around $2.99 revenues in the order of $300MM will be generated, of which 30% goes to Apple. 

While there are some good solutions, in app advertising is not making up the gap between costs and revenue. Of course. there may be other, harder to quantify benefits, for creating a iPhone app. While there are exceptions  the reality is that for most aspiring iPhone App millionaires, it's a tough road ahead.

Unless you make the top 25 lists, it's difficult to be found and stand out in the store among 60,000+ apps, the expectations for an app from the user base are high and the willingness to pay for a good app is low.

7/14 Updated: Apple has just announced that downloads have reached 1.5B and 100,000 developers are working on Apps. See article at VentureBeat

It is however a great business for Apple and helps sell a lot of iPhones and iPod touches. Some of my current apps favorites include:

Tweetdeck 

Twitterific 

Facebook 

LinkedIn 

Bump 

Google 

Google Earth 

Amazon 

B&N 

Kindle 

Stanza 

e-reader 

USAToday 

NYTimes 

Wall Street Journal

AP Mobile 

San Francisco Business Times 

AroundMe 

Fedex Mobile 

Shazam 

Pandora 

Skype 

Zillow 

Trulia

Tripit 

Flight Track Pro 

Weather Channel 

Evernote

The past could be history.

An excellent article by Jim Stongill, touches on the opportunity through the digitalization of books, for our culture and history to be available and accessible through search. 

Analogue content exists in multiple formats but it's in danger of being lost or just being too hard to find. Newspapers, over the centuries have been the chronicles of world, national, regional and local happenings they need to be preserved in our digital era.

Reading an archive edition of the New York Times or your local paper for the day on which you were born, or for some other memorable occasion, richly brings to life all aspects of social life at that time - the hopes and aspirations, the human achievements and tragedies; all the rich tapestry of human life. It's one thing to trace your family tree but it's much more meaningful if you can appreciate how your ancestors were living at the time - the media of the time allows you to do that. Of course, analogue records exist in libraries but it takes an awful lot of effort to find the content.

As the doors shutter on many newspapers and their offices and basements are hastily cleaned out, is anyone thinking about saving these incredible legacy records?  Is preserving history worth the expense?

For over four decades, IDG has covered the IT industry worldwide. There is no other media company that has the timeline history of the developments in the industry, but even so, if you wanted to research some aspect of computer history, the archives are difficult to access. Ideally the information should be available within a search bar.  To achieve goal, IDG worked with the Google archive project, to digitalize IDG's newspaper archives.

Google Archive took IDG's complete archives of Computerworld going back to the very first issue in June 1967 and digitalized them for free. Finding a complete set was a challenge in itself but luckily all issues were eventually located. Early issues were preserved on microfilm and microfiche, while later copies were available in print and more recently in various digital formats. 

The cost of converting over 40 years of analogue information in multiple formats to digital is significant. Most publishers are unwilling to undertake the exercise if the revenue streams associated with archive content do not cover the conversion cost.  Also, there are author, artist and photographic rights that were crafted in a pre-digital era that can present significant legal challenges. These rights issues unfortunately stopped IDG from carrying out a similar exercise for its computer magazines such as PC World and Macworld.

IDG was willing to place its content into the Google archive so the history of the computer industry could be freely available to everyone. The arrangement with Google included revenue sharing opportunities around the advertising that is delivered with the content.

I believe the Google Archive project is admirable and clearly fits into Google's mission of cataloging all the world's information but like too many of Google's secondary projects it appears to be languishing a bit and archived information is not as integrated into the main search results as it should be. I hope that will be addressed as the project is developed further.

Media owners, especially those where media properties have been shuttered or are likely to be, should consider if they want to help preserve history or allow it to be shredded.  If the economic cost is too significant to absorb, partner programs such as Google Archive offer a free option.  If publishers want to retain full control, believing that can better monetize the content via paid access on their own sites rather than via Google, then are a number of services that will carry out the digital conversion. 

But it's not just the newspaper industry that should digitalize their archives. The B2B media industry has the history of the business verticals through newspapers and magazines.  

Check your archives and digitalize them before it's too late.

The need for a Media Publishing Association

The MPA (The Magazine Publishers of America) today is releasing an analysis that assigns a relative value to each minute consumed, and not surprisingly, consumer magazine stack up very well vs. other major consumer media on that basis, including TV, radio, the Internet, and even the other major consumer print medium, newspapers.

While laudable to show the value of magazine advertising I think the MPA has to take a real leadership in looking at the audience relationship with the brand - and stop putting the magazine at the center of the universe. Print magazines can be key product - but publishers are not in the print business - they are in the customer information business - it takes bold vision to move the conversation up a notch - which I think the MPA can do - but as long as it's just seen as a defensive trade organization, protecting print, then its long-term relevance will be questioned and it will continue to lose membership support and the dues that are necessary to fulfill a long-term mission.

I believe the industry needs an MPA - the Media Publishing Association. An organization that can get behind the value of print, online, mobile all vital but very different mass media with vastly different user experiences.

The current MPA is just not going to win a print versus other media argument but it definitely has more chance of winning an argument that values all media with magazines playing a role.

The Mobile Difference - a wake up call ?

A fascinating report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project on mobile internet usage. As an internet driven culture the US has a significant way to go to catch-up with the mobile cultures of developing countries - such as China, India and to some extent Europe. This report should be a wake up call. 

According to the analysis, 61% of the adult population do not feel the pull of mobility. That needs to change - mobile companies have to do a much better job selling the value proposition that mobile access brings. Mobile can deliver huge personal and business productivity benefits. It's the next mass media and publishers and other organizations need to be planning for the transition to mobile now. The transition from print to online is nothing compared to the disruption mobile will cause over the next few years.

Digital Collaborators: 8% of adults use information gadgets to collaborate with others and share their creativity with the world.


Ambivalent Networkers: 7% of adults heavily use mobile devices to connect with others and entertain themselves, but they don’t always like it when the cell phone rings.


Media Movers: 7% of adults use online access to seek out information nuggets, and these nuggets make their way through these users’ social networks via desktop and mobile access.


Roving Nodes: 9% of adults use their mobile devices to connect with others and share information with them.


Mobile Newbies: 8% of adults lack robust access to the internet, but they like their cell phones.


Desktop Veterans: 13% of adults are dedicated to wireline access to digital information, and like how it opens up the pipeline to information for them.


Drifting Surfers: 14% of adults are light users – despite having a lot of ICTs – and say they could do without modern gadgets and services.


Information Encumbered: 10% of adults feel overwhelmed by information and inadequate to troubleshoot modern ICTs.
The Tech Indifferent: 10% of adults are unenthusiastic about the internet and cell phone.


Off the Network: 14% of adults are neither cell phone users nor internet users.


Most “motivated by mobility” groups have positive and improving attitudes about cell phones, while remaining groups have tepid and deteriorating attitudes about them.
Deepening attachment to digital resources – wired and wireless – means connectivity is for many users now about continual information exchange.
The bar for what qualifies as high-tech among users has risen.
The “penalty” for having little or no access rises in a multi-platform world.

Apple’s iPhone 3.0 – a tipping point for a beleaguered publishing industry?

 

At a St. Patrick’s Day press event in Cupertino, Apple announced the developer beta of iPhone OS 3.0.

The implications for the publishing industry are huge but extremely welcome. Ultimately, today’s announcement will be seen as a tipping point for an industry that is facing massive economic havoc caused by the combined impact of the Internet and the current economic recession. 

The critical part of today’s announcement for publishers is the ability to leverage the purchase model of the App Store within individual apps. In-App Purchases now allow developers (and media publishers) to offer subscription content and provides the ability to sell new content and features in a simple and secure process.  Before this announcement, publishers could not easily monetize their mobile content via a paid model. Now, a paid content model on mobile has opened up for media companies. 

For the last fifteen years, publishers have watched with anguish as the free content model of the Internet wrecked havoc with their businesses. Initially, online advertising provided some economic support for the cost of content creation but analogue dollars rapidly converted to digital pennies  (it appears we've now moved up to digital dimes) The majority of online revenues have gone mainly to the search engines rather than to traditional media companies who create the original content. Lost subscription and newsstand revenues, plus reduced online advertising revenues (in overall dollar terms) cannot compensate for the collapse of print revenues. Some B2B publishers, such as my previous employer, International Data Group fared better as they focused on performance based revenue streams, especially around lead generation.

Many publishers’ inability to adapt quickly to the changes brought about by the internet is part of the problem – but it’s hard to compete with free and it’s really difficult to break a highly profitable cash generating model for one with uncertain revenues and profits.

The transition from print to online is challenged under today’s business models. Some argue that print can be fixed by changing the business model. However, I don’t subscribe to that view. Print is not “dead” but is much less relevant as a medium for the consumption and creation of content.

Today, nearly all publishing is digital publishing and nearly all writing is for digital media. Publishers have to adapt to the realities around them, not cling unrealistically to a previous era.

Now, we’re about to go into another media transition. Online is now fairly well established but mobile is about to surge.

Mobile is the 7th of the Mass Media , and it offers publishers the opportunity to redefine their businesses and to really learn from some of the mistakes during the era of print to online transition.

The good news is that users’ psychology around mobile is very different to how they view online – they are actually willing (or have been conditioned) to pay for stuff – for SMS, for ringtones, for music, for games, for content – either via the carriers or as Apple’s iTunes has shown, via a convenient online storefront that is completely separate from the carriers.

Through the iTunes store, users can purchase music, movies, audio books, and iPhone applications. It’s a breeze to use and integrated well with both your computer and iPhone.

Today there are approximately 28,000 apps of which around 75% are paid apps. Excluding the free apps, the average price of paid apps is a little under $4. According to Apple, 800,000,000 apps have been downloaded and while the majority of downloads are for free, if even 10% of these downloads are paid, assuming an average of $4, that represents approximately gross revenues of $320MM. Apple takes 30%. It’s not hard to see this growing to a multi-billion dollar business over the next few years.

As the number of apps grows rapidly there is increasing concern over discovery. If you are selling a game app for $0.99 you are competing with another 6,000. So unless you get on the top 25 list or are a featured app it’s extremely hard to get noticed.  The Apps Store is not currently searchable by the various search engines, so the concept of Apps Store Optimization (ASO) is not developed – yet.

Apple’s taxonomy and sub-categorization leaves much to be desired and the interface is based more around a browse than a search metaphor. But, despite these and other go-to-market challenges currently facing developers, the Apps Store, coupled with 30 million iPhones and iPod Touch devices is a huge addressable market and growing rapidly. It can’t be ignored.

Today’s announcement, plus an expected upgrade to the iPhone in the summer will ensure solid momentum for the product with the other handset manufacturers scrambling to play catch-up.

For publishers, the subscription model available with the Apps Store helps answer the question of whether to mobilize a web page or develop an app. While my recommendation is that publishers need to develop a very comprehensive mobile strategy, the revenue streams are more likely to be from a paid app that from advertising off a mobilized web page.

Mobile digital content is really starting to take off. Over the last several weeks, there has been a lot of activity in the e-book market. It’s largely driven by the publicity around the release of Amazon’s Kindle 2 and the accompanying iPhone application but other news includes the acquisition of Fictionwise and e-reader by Barnes and Noble. Google marches ahead with their digital book archive project and digital book search but it’s still unclear if their motivation is to be an online e-book retailer or it's perhaps more likely that they are using digitalization of books to improve their search algorithms.

While e-book industry is still struggling with format and DRM issues these are gradually getting resolved. The ePub format is fast becoming the general standard – adopted by the International Digital Publishing Forum and The Association of American Publishers. Various other formats such as pdf, Adobe Digital Edition, MobiPocket and Microsoft Reader continue exist because of DRM issues but publishers will who write to the ePub standard first using programs such as Adobe’s Creative Studio can fairly easily convert to the other formats or go through a service such as LibreDigital  who will manage conversion and distribution on publishers’ behalf.

While Amazon has a proprietary format and is enforcing DRM, to the point that it’s not possible to transfer books purchased in other formats to the Kindle, many hope that eventually users’ interests will prevail over corporate shortsightedness.

The current crop of e-readers, using e-ink technology offers a reasonable experience for trade book reading – as only text display is necessary. However, the current grayscale displays offer less than optimal experience for those wanting to view digital copies of reference books, textbooks, Science, Technical and Medical (STM) books and newspapers and magazines with images. 

Existing large format devices such as the iRex iLiad and upcoming readers from PlasticLogic,  Hearst’s FirstPaper Device are trying to appeal to the business market, especially those requiring a larger reading screen. 

The ability to transfer a pdf to the Kindle via Amazon’s free service negates a lot of their advertised advantages. Transferring and reading pdfs on a Kindle is a perfectly acceptable experience for now.

I don’t think the Kindle or the current crop of e-readers is the white knight for publishers but Apple and the iPhone 3.0 could be the necessary catalyst.

For those interested in trends in the e-book industry see the following presentations from the International Digital Publishing Forum and BookNet Canada.

The mobile Internet device (MIDs) market is evolving rapidly although the limitations of the current crop of black-and-white e-readers have many yearning for a tablet or netbook device from Apple – an iPod Touch on steroids.

Although Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs has been disdainful of the e-book market in the past – most understand that Apple will carefully analyze the market and if it believes the market is significant the organization will come in with a vastly improved solution. However,  a combination of technology issues, component pricing plus the economy could delay what many believe is an inevitable move by Apple.

There is a collision going on in the market – the carriers, especially in Europe, are looking to subsidized netbooks to drive data revenue streams. Netbooks, spurred on by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program are generally dumbed down but inexpensive Internet access devices, (price points around are  $299). They have basic communications and Internet access but with limited storage and processing power. 

Most major PC companies are producing small laptops – called by a variety of names – UltraMobilePCs (UMPCs), “Litebooks”, “PocketBooks“ or mini notebooks, which while more expensive than Netbooks, have the functionality expected of laptops/ notebooks.

For the PC companies it’s a balancing act – these mini-notebooks have lower prices and margins than their standard laptop offerings so while consumer demand appears to be strong, the PC companies have to manage their bottom line.

The success of Apple’s iPhone plus their Apps store, the impact on other handset manufacturers, the growth of e-ink readers, the consumer demand for Netbooks and Mini-notebooks all adds up to the increased consumption of content via mobile devices.

Only a fool would try and accurately predict the future but the trends we see today are going to shape the media industry over the next 5-10 years.

Mobile is a game changer. Mobile devices (and there will be many varieties) benefit from being personal, always-on, always carried, and location aware. They can act as a mobile wallet and they allow you create and upload content to your social and business networks.

Mobile will redefine our understanding of the Internet and personal communications.

Publishers need to start really thinking through their mobile strategies.

Media companies need to plan how they can best serve their audiences via mobile access. The user interface and user experience will be critical. Many publishers learned the hard way that online is not taking a print magazine or newspaper and making it digital. Online, thanks to search and interactivity, is a different medium and content has to address the user experience. Mobile is not an online site mobilized. The medium is different yet again and a lot of research has to be spent understanding the needs of mobile users.

The industry’s key organizations, the Newspaper Association of America, the Magazine Publishers of Amerce (MPA), the American Business Media, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Mobile Marketing Association and others can and should take a leadership position helping to guide their members through this exciting period in our industry.

Goodbye, Colorado, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle …… Tucson…..

After nearly 150 years in business, on Friday 27th February 2009, the Rocky Mountain News published its final edition. Philadelphia Newspapers have filed for bankruptcy and Hearst is threatening to close the San Francisco Chronicle if it cannot get agreement on massive, wide ranging cuts or a buyer. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer could be next. 

 

The closures are blamed both on a bad economy and also the rise of the Internet. A drastic drop in print classified advertising fueled by online services such as Craigslist alongside the increased consumption of information in digital formats especially by the younger readers has resulted in secular changes in the industry.

While the significant human impact on those who have dedicated their lives to producing quality products is summed up well in the video  - Final Edition it also showcases people’s desire to retain the status quo. In today’s environment, that’s not a realistic option.

The financial issues are complex but a lot of the problems have been caused by legacy media companies failing to quickly and boldly address the fundamental question – “what industry are we in”. The need for transformative action has been obvious for many years but the industry, for various reasons, has been unable or unwilling to make radical changes. 

“No Iceberg” from Eric Wilkinson, the CEO of the International NewsMedia Marketing Association (INMA) is a good overview of the issues facing the newspaper industry but it probably does not go far enough to address the changes needed.

The correct answer for media companies is to understand they are in the Information business and that the medium – print, online or mobile is secondary.

Delivery of information should be tailored to the needs of target audiences. The laid back, rich visual experience of print, the lean forward search environment of online or the immediate access to targeted local content via mobile devices offer different and complementary experiences – each has its place.

An unhealthy, over-reliance on advertising is the root cause of the problems facing print newspapers in the US. For decades, readers have been trained to receive content that is heavily subsidized by marketers and advertisers. There is a completely different psychology and appreciation of value when someone has to pay. Good content costs a lot of money to produce and if quality products are to survive, both consumers and advertisers have to pay a reasonable share.

Hearst’s president Steven Swartz is halfway through “a 100 days of change” and a memo that is contained in a recent Wall Street Journal blog is well worth a read.  But as argued by Jeff Jarvis, it is probably to too late for the evolutionary changes proposed when a more radical approach is still required.

However, I’m extremely interested to learn more about Hearst’s decision to develop an e-reader and to charge for content consumed via mobile devices. While Hearst has not indicated which technology it will use, it could be the reader from Plastic Logic or from their investment FirstPaper. Hearst is also an investor in e-ink.

Plastic Logic's electronic reader is about the size of an 8.5 x 11 inch pad of paper and weighs less than many print magazines and should be available late 2009.

The reader has the potential for widespread use as an alternative to printed publications. But it faces competition from Amazon's new Kindle 2 e-book reader, Sony’s touch screen reader PRS-700, the iRex iLiad and the increasing use of devices such as the iPhone and the iPod Touch to consume digital contact. Reader’s such as ScrollMotion’s Iceberg and LexCycle’s Stanza also put well formatted content in the palm of your hand. Netbooks, mininotebooks, UMPCs all are driving mobile information consumption. Flexible touch screen technology is sure to revolutionize the mobile market over the next few years. 

But, there is no easy panacea to the woes of the print industry. The disruption is wrenching in human and economic terms as the world rapidly shifts to the consumption of content via digital mediums.

However, even as distribution mediums and business models face pressure, publishers should take heart that their audiences still seek quality news and information. The addressable audiences is actually expanding, publishers can reach more people in a targeted way than ever before. Despite some fears, democracy is not going to collapse just because some newspapers fail. In fact, greater audience participation, especially at a local and community level is likely to improve government.

New business models are required for publishers to succeed. Users have to pay a fair amount for access to quality content just as advertiser should pay for access to targeted audiences. Perhaps books on demand production using the Expresso Book Machine or magazine on demand from MagCloud will help change the economics. 

Mobile offers publishers some light at the end of a long tunnel. It’s still at early stage of deployment but mobile data usage will grow exponentially over the next 5-years. According to a recently released report by the Kelsey Group, mobile advertising in the US will balloon for $3.1 billion by 2013 from $160 million last year.

While the business models for mobile remain under developed, the trends are obvious. Smart publishers will be investing now and preparing their organizations to understand what news and information needs to be delivered via mobile devices in a manner that can economically cover creation costs.

Maybe in 5-years time as mobile becomes a dominant platform for the consumption of content – it will be online businesses that will be lamenting their final editions. Check out the Charlie Rose interview with Marc Andreessen for a great perspective.

The Ongoing Digital Publishing Revolution

This is a repost of my recent Minsider Column check out more from my other colleagues at Minsider Perspectives

Approximately 15 years ago, the World Wide Web burst onto the scene, forever altering the world of publishing. Over the next decade and a half, publishing transformed from a one-way medium in which content was created and distributed by publishers to captive audiences, to an environment in which virtually anyone could become a creator, aggregator or distributor.

Armed with easy-to-use publishing and communication tools, the audiences changed from passive recipients of information to active conversationalists. Efficient search tools helped people filter and reach content of interest from multiple sources.

This new world of search, distributed content and social and business networks placed enormous pressure on traditional publishers, many of whom focused on protecting their rapidly eroding traditional brands and business models rather than embracing change.

The old CPM media model assumed that everyone who received a publication read every advertisement. In times of economic prosperity, the ads kept coming in and the average revenue per user rose, producing handsome profits for publishers.

However, with audiences spending more time online, advertisers and marketers are now increasingly focused on direct response and measuring audience engagement.

Mass reach is now much less important that targeted and engaged audiences. The result for many media companies, as famously noted by Jeff Zucker, the CEO of NCB Universal, resulted in analog dollars being converted into digital pennies. With pressure from advertisers and reducing circulation revenues, now publishers are forced to question the cost of creating original differentiated content and having to blend in content from sources that are a lot less expensive.

Marketing spend continues to shift rapidly to online. Even in these tough economic times, overall online revenues are expected to grow by around 10% in 2009, and online’s share of media will continue to increase. However, the marketers’ spend, rather than going to traditional publishers, is being allocated to the search companies, putting even more pressure on publishers.

Advertisers and marketers are intensely focused on audience quality, their engagement and the overall ROMI performance. While many question advertisers’ overreliance on PPC advertising online at the expense of awareness and brand building, performance-based advertising is likely to be a major beneficiary in these recessionary times.

A major test facing publishers is to prove the effectiveness of general CPM brand- and awareness-building ads online, where the environment is more about the engagement of the audience with relevant, targeted information.

Transforming a traditional company to being online focused is not easy. The successful ones have realized that relying on just online advertising is a recipe for disaster. By developing additional revenue streams such as lead generation, e-commerce and even online subscriptions, b2b publishers have found online businesses that are closer to the old print models of advertising, subscriptions and newsstand sales.

Today, online publishers are focused relentlessly on overall RPM (revenues per thousand pages) and its component revenues streams, trying to reduce over-reliance on any single revenue stream. Recognizing that a rigid adherence to premium pricing while protecting the brand value is causing marketers to seek out similar online audiences from third-party networks, the more innovative publishers, such as my former employer IDG, have developed their own vertical networks (the IDG Technology Network) that are closely aligned with their core properties, but at the same time provide marketers with low-cost extended reach outside the branded environment.

The delicate balance of protecting core profitable print brands while dealing with the changing dynamics of digital is exceptionally challenging, and the bad news is that there are even greater challenges on the horizon.

If the transition from print to online was hard enough, the disruptive impact of mobile is several magnitudes greater.

Small Screen, Big 

Opportunity

Mobile

 is the new mass media. It can do everything that can be done by all previous mass media, plus a lot more.

Mobile

 is nearly always on, always carried (or close by) and it’s highly personal. It operates as the remote to your physical and digital life.

With over 4 billion mobile connections in the world, compared to around 1.1 billion fixed Internet connections, the scale and potential opportunity of mobile is huge but incredibly challenging.

Print is a lean-back environment and online a lean-forward one. 

Mobile

 is all about immediacy. Instant communication, instant information related to your location, instant consumption and creation of content—all in a small-screen environment.

It’s a world of digital snacking, not the leisurely consumption of long-form content. That’s likely to change as different mobile Internet devices appear with larger screens. The Kindle offers a glimpse of what possible for the consumption of e-books, digital magazines and newspapers—maintaining the familiar format of print but in an enhanced interactive, digital environment. The iPhone has revolutionized the smartphone market, delivering a powerful computer in your hand.

In addition to the phone features, you now have easy access to the mobile Internet plus the choice of more than 20,000 phone applications covering the gamut of entertainment and gaming to high-end business productivity.

With the other handset manufacturers developing their own mobile application stores, the consumer is going to be faced with bewildering choices.

For publishers, it’s potentially a highly rewarding environment. The challenge is to determine what content to deliver, what customer data to collect, how to design great user interfaces and experiences while finding ways to drive revenue.

Over the next few months I’ll identify those publishers who are the most innovative and successful, so hopefully all media companies will be encouraged to grasp the mobile opportunity that lies ahead.

The death of print is a fairy tale - really ?

Over at Writer's Digest there is an interesting debate on the future of magazines between Bob Sacks, better known as “BoSacks,” a 38-year veteran of the publishing industry whose e-newsletter, “Heard on the Web: Media Intelligence,” reaches nearly 12,000 readers daily and is essential reading for anyone in the magazine and media industry. BoSacks is a proponent of the digital world and is a strong believer in the developments that are happening around e-paper and the growth of various e-readers and netbooks. In the opposing corner is Samir Husni, nicknamed “Mr. Magazine,” who holds a doctorate in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and is the author of Launch Your Own Magazine: A Guide for Succeeding in Today’s Marketplace who has an amazingly optimistic view on the future of print. The two columns, It's a Digital World Now and The Death of Print Magazine and other Fairy Tales are fascinating reading and represent extreme viewpoints from the publishing industry. 

Personally, I'm in BoSack's camp. While I appreciate the tactile experience of magazines and all the reading and visual advantages they bring - print magazines are just less relevant today given the developments in the digital world. There will be niches where print magazines survive for many more years but these will look like hobbies rather big business. And that's OK. For those interested in vertical segments and enjoy the print experience there will be publishers willing to serve them. The mass-market consumer glossies will also have their place for as it will be many years before technology replaces the print experience of Vanity Fair for the general consumer. However, to ignore the long-term digital trends, the advantages of the digital format plus the current actions being taken by consumers, is to live in a fantasy world.

It's still some time off before mass adoption but eventually we'll see cost effective e-paper work in various mobile formats. In digital form, e-paper readers will go much further than static text - there will be search, interactivity, social communications, real-time updating via WiFi with audio, video and other multimedia complementing the text format.

As a parent who watches his son hunch over as he carries a huge weight of textbooks to school every day - I cannot wait for the textbook industry to be reformed. It's a total disgrace - over priced, out of date text books are being forced on our kids by an industry trying to protect a legacy business model. An excellent recent article in The Washington Post discusses the jolt that's needed. I truly hope that a company such as Apple or Amazon combines a hardware and distribution strategy to revolutionize the way our children access and interact with information.

Sorry Mr. Magazine, now we live in a dynamic not static world. Print is a vestige of the past - it has many admirable attributes and will be around for quite a while - but today we don't just want prepackaged text pushed at us - we want to be involved in the content and the discussion around it. Digital and mobility are the way forward - clinging to icons of the past is a disservice to the readers of the future.  I know whose class I would recommend my kids to enroll in.

Destination sites are not sufficient

Over at MediaPost, Joe Marchese, discusses marketers involvement in social media. The article references an extremely comprehensive piece on Widgets in AdAge byBob Garfield  which is an excellent read. The core of the argument being that visitors are spending much more time going to Google, Yahoo and Facebook rather than to destination sites. Brands have to balance a destination site strategy - ( where most of the audience comes in via SEO (search Engine Optimization), SMO (Social Media Optimization) and other search programs rather than via bookmarked and typed in urls) - with distribution and syndication strategies in order to reach target audiences no matter where there are hanging out.

Media7's mobile round-up

Always worth checking out Carnival of the Mobilists  for regular round-ups on mobile - the latest is from Jude Breck  also, there's a good weekly round-up at Dial a Phone.

There is a list of useful links at MobiThinking.  Last week, mobile reporting really came of age as the New York Times Correspondent, Keith Bradsher sent updates of the terror attack in Mumbaii 

Twitter also made the headlines with dozens of updates being sent every minute as events unfolded although some claimed the content was less than accurate.

"The characteristics of Twitter make it a perfect tool for use in emergencies - both for disseminating updates and information, and for coordinating help efforts such as contacting friends and relatives"

148Apps is a good resource for iPhone apps and they have just created a tribute page for the current 10,000+ iPhone Apps. Around 2,500 new apps are being added every month. The site lists various statistics including the average price - which is approx $3 with the vast majority priced at  $1.99 and below.

Mobile as the 7th Mass Media - my friend Tomi Ahonen over at Communities Dominate Brands has launched a new blog to support his latest book Mobile as the 7th Mass Media.

There's a great article in the NYTime about data being extracted from mobile phone usage.

Also on the subject of the NYTimes, they now claim to have around 10,000 paid subscribers on Amazon's Kindle 

Finally, be careful what you get up to in public   Pieter DeCrem's defense   "I would like to use this occasion and "non event" to point out a dangerous phenomenon in our society; we're living in times where everyone is allowed to publish on blogs, when they please and without any form of responsibility.."  did not cut it with blogosphere  and even a FaceBook Group was formed to ridicule the minister protestations.  

Exciting times ahead for "new" media companies, tough ones for traditionalists

Despite the doom and gloom of falling circulation and advertising that’s besetting traditional media - the worst of times will eventually lead to the best of times. This economic crisis will force major changes in the thinking of traditional media companies. Of course, it's probably more likely that key executives will have to be retired before we see real long-term strategic shifts.

The current climate is creating an amazing entrepreneurial opportunity to build "new media companies" - organizations that are unburdened by the vestiges of traditional media thinking - ones that ditch the command and control mentality and open up to their audiences.

Excessive control of content and messaging has already shifted. For the last several years we've been moving to a world of disintermediation. The openness of the web has taken away a significant amount of power from traditional media houses and placed it in the hands of their audiences.  Now, content is widely distributed and syndicated – often in an uncontrollable manner. 

We're now in a world of audience participation or "social media" - a world where it's all about engaging distributed audiences with contextually relevant content. No longer limited to traditional brands, news and information topics can be created by virtually anyone by the intelligent re-aggregating of fragmented content.

It’s world where publishers and marketers collaborate with audiences rather than broadcasting irrelevant stuff at them. The old adage of the general being pushed out by the specific is particularly relevant today. Users expect information and marketing that's relevant to their interests and needs - they will turn out the rest. It's all about the user experience  http://www.nngroup.com/ 

Unfortunately, it's painfully evident that many traditional publishers just still don't get it - as demonstrated by some recent high profile lay-offs - much digital talent has been let go with the old guard regaining power - this short term thinking underscores a total lack of understanding of what is happening on today’s web and tomorrow on the mobile internet.  Medium to long-term strategy is being sacrificed for immediate returns. While some of the decisions are understandable from a short-term financial perspective, in a few years time these media organizations are going to severely regret such brand asset stripping moves.

It seems that in this period of economic uncertainty too many traditional publishers and marketers are rapidly surrendering and retreating to the medium they understand from their past - print, rather than being prepared to go on the offensive and embrace the fundamental secular shifts in the media industry being embrace by the new generations of users.

The web has evolved over two decades from the original HTML document centric approach of Web 1.0 to Web 1.5, which was about interactivity, and search to one of relationships around content - the social Web 2.0.  Now it is moving to one of interlinking applications with the dynamic and intelligent linking of content around semantic connections. Content is being automatically connected with people, place and location - the so-called semantic Web 3.0. On top of all that, mobile Internet usage will soon dwarf laptop and desktop Internet usage.  It already has in certain regions of the world.

Traditional roles have changed. The role of editors has evolved from one of being focused primarily on original content creation to one of content curation - linking to content from all over the web plus involving audiences in discussion while actively encouraging them to virally distribute content to their own networks.

To quote Jeff Jarvis – cover what you do best - link the rest.  Media sales teams now have to look beyond the limited scale of a brand site approach to delivering audience reach across the web. Audience development and the needs of the user absolutely must be at the heart of any digital strategy. 

Media companies should appoint audience development, community strategists and community managers to senior management positions to help drive the new focus. Technology needs to be in place to allow publishers to understand the behavioral of their audiences so marketing can be appropriately targeted to users’ interests. The world of online CPM advertising will be under tremendous economic pressure - however publishers that can prove engaged, participatory audiences will command premium rates. Engaged, loyal audiences are the key defensive barriers to competition. Engagement Intensity is today's key KPI. 

It's a dififcult cultural transition for many but relatively inexpensive technology is available to build these new media companies - so new competitors will appear rapidly, putting even more pressure on the current strategies of existing brand publishers. 

Publishers and brand marketers that don't evolve to connect and engage with their communities are quickly heading to the bankruptcy court. Debt-burdened companies will be foreced to restructure to survive and it will be painful for many. Over the next year, smart fire-sale buyers will swoop in and buy brands and audiences on the cheap and rebuild these brands in a way that incumbent management has failed so to do.

Media companies should look to companies such as Apple for inspiration - Steve Job's leadership aided by a highly competent supporting cast took a failing company and beleaguered brand and re-polished it by focusing on the total user experience coupled with a unrelenting focus on the quality of their products, resulting in a incredible passion and loyalty for the Apple's brands  - Mac, iPod and iPhone. 

While the economic challenges are significant - a massive opportunity exists to build a new media businesses in this new digital age of audience interaction. Bloated, inefficient and slow moving companies will rightly die but we'll see the emergence of exciting new media companies unburdened by the cultural inflexibility of many existing media companies. 

The industry will be re-energized as a result. The new media companies will be largely driven by a new generation of "Young Turks" often who will be mentored and hired by seasoned media executives who actually welcome the inevitable changes. This new generation of digital natives, who live on their laptop and mobile phones, will shape the media content and distributions companies of the future. 

The long-term future of publishing is very bright.  Embrace it.

Highly recommended reading  Marketing to the Social Web by Larry Weber and associated website 

The Forrester Series "Reinventing Media eBusiness" series by Sarah Rotman Epps (payment required)

Media7

I recently announced on LinkedIn that I have a new job.

After nearly 16 great years at IDG in various roles - CEO of Macworld, leading the MacPublishing joint venture between IDG and Ziff Davis, heading up IDG Connect (IDG's Premium Lead Generation Service) plus various strategic roles on the IDG Executive Committee - with a particular focus on helping the company transition to a digital and online centric organization. Now, it's time to try something new. 

I intend to use the skills developed over the last 20 years in media to set-up Media7 Consultancy - which will focus on helping publishing companies make the transfer to digital as well as growing their online and mobile businesses. I will be working with several organizations as an advisor, some as a board member and for others Media7 will provide consultancy services. I strongly believe that mobile will become the most important media - hence the name of the company - which pays tribute to Tomi Ahonen who for the last couple of years has been arguing this point and has recently published a book on the subject.

I'm also staying close to the IDG family, and will be working with the partners in the San Francisco office of IDG Ventures, assisting them with deal flow and analysis - perhaps, in due course, even getting involved in one of the portfolio companies or companies under consideration.

The economy is very tough but opportunities abound - the companies that make it through the next couple of years will be well positioned to take advantage of the eventual up-turn. The next few years will be about maximizing operational efficiencies and capital preservation while looking for revenue growth - so I'm extremely excited to have the time and flexibility to take a bit of a step back to really evaluate some amazing organizations and exciting ideas and to work with bright, enthusiastic teams - not only start-ups but also legacy companies re-inventing themselves.

I'm most grateful to IDG, in particular Pat McGovern whose vision and leadership remains totally inspiring - my good colleague, IDG's CEO  Bob Carrigan, plus many, many good friends at IDG and in the industry - including IDG's competitors. I've had the good fortune to work with some remarkable people.

I look forward to staying in touch as Media7 evolves.

Networked Journalism Summit

I had the pleasure of attending Networked Journalism Summit , excellently moderated by Jeff Jarvis. I got a couple of minutes to speak about some of the transition strategies that have happened at IDG – Jeff has highlighted the comments on my blog previously - the light at the end of the press and Print Sucks (his headline) so I won’t repeat them here. The key point is that IDG is not emotionally invested in print – it’s invested in providing quality information to readers - no matter in which form they want to receive it  - print, online or mobile.  It’s about making audiences and their eyeballs available to marketers in appropriate ways. Longer term, some of the strategies that need to be pursued by publishers should include:

1. Continuing to build digital audiences - today, that's online - tomorrow increasingly mobile - I expect to seen significant mobile revenues towards the end of 2009 early 2010.

2. Focus on audience engagement - using KPIs to monitor improvement in engagement- IDG's Market Fusion program and the developments of the Engagement Intensity Index are solid examples of this approach.

3. Drive performance based solutions for marketers - especially around premium lead generation services, custom publishing, events and mobile- the launch of IDG Connect, http://www.idgconnect.com/ IDG’s central database to drive response programs has been extremely successful and now responsible for significant revenues.

4 Extend audiences and inventory via the development of a Vertical Publisher Network - the launch of the IDG Technology Network http://www.idgtechnetwork.com/ recognizes it's not all about being a destination site but rather focusing on the aggregation of content and audience fragmentation.

5. Look to build end-user revenue streams online - via appropriate e-commerce. A successful example is the Macworld SuperGuides 

6. Managing the print properties for "profit" - or at least ensuring there is positive contribution to overhead.

7. Preparing for the Web 3 - the Semantic Web  - thinking about content as objects and the relationships between content, companies, people and places - viewing the web as interconnected data and rich applications

8 Continuing to stay close to readers and advertisers - using research to help identify products that meet the needs of the marketplace.

The workshop discussions were illuminating, I sat in on the one focused on revenue lead by Fred Wilson   – while around 20 different revenue streams were identified – generally my sense was that publishers still are too focused on revenue model that are associated with print and are leaving opportunities associated with the data associated with their audiences and content.

Panels

You'll have noticed a small in text blue icon next to companies mentioned in the posts. Rolling over the icon opens up a "panel" that displays additional information about the organization.  

“Panels” is a new consumer information network that instantly gives users the most sought after information about any organization, brand, or advertisement – in a standardized, consistent, and predictable format called a “Panel.” Panels can appear on any internet ad, blog, social profile page, email signature, URL, brand name, and more. These “Panels” automatically deliver contextually relevant and in‐depth information to users about any entity, at any time, from numerous data sources.
Users get this information for free without diverting them from their web location and without requiring any effort on their part. Panels’ categories are organized as tabs across the top of the panel and so far the following are available;

“About”  - Basic company and contact info, URL, logo, and summary
“Site”  - A full preview of the home page, stats, tags and other goodies about the actual web site/blog
“Map”  - Beginning with Google Maps, and others to follow, a place for geographic data
“News”  - Headlines, Blog posts, News, Press Releases and more from a variety of sources
“Jobs”  - Employment listings across numerous providers such as Monster and SimplyHired
“Financial”  - If a public company, real-time info and quotes appear in several sub-categories

Coming Soon over the next few weeks are “Reviews” and “Shop” 

Site Search - Lastly, notice in the lower left hard corner of the panels, you can easily search just the target site right from here, with results opening up in a new window or tab. 

Panels appear for any company or organization ranging from the biggest public companies such as Apple, Ford, AT&T, or WalMart to up and coming startups such as WebDiet (launched at Demo Fall 08 ) and Yammer (launched at TechCrunch50)

Panels make any blog significantly more useful for readers and more successful for the publisher/blogger/website owner because;

Users will stay on the page because they can get deep information via panels and,
Clicks on links - including ads - will dramatically increase   

More information on panels is available here. If you'd like to test out panels on you blog - send an email to me at colincrawford@gmail.com - implementation is simple.

If you're not mobile - you are not in touch with a whole generation

Excellent and informative two-part interview with Marc Mielau, Innovation Manager for Mobile Marketing at BMW. Part 1 , Part 2

Taking mobile marketing opportunities very seriously, BMW has established a cross-divisional group, the mobile marketing circle that meets every third week with the goal of building synergies across the full range of mobile activities.

Marc attitude - “I believe that it’s a short step from “mobile advertising” to “mobile everything”, which includes mobile advertising, mobile communications, mobile entertainment, and even mobile commerce”. “A multi-channel approach to marketing will be necessary in the future, and mobile will play an important role. We think mobile marketing is about trying to reach customers with added value offers. This is the focus of the Innovation group.”

BMW has been testing 2D bar-codes, the use of SMS to provide customers with additional information additional and also informational MMS to enable customers to get advice and recommendations from their friends

In the second part of the interview, Marc discusses some of the highly successful mobile marketing campaigns that BMW has run recently, in partucular the use of MMS in conjunction with their customer database to render for each customer, an individualized picture of their specific kind of car, it's specific color, and a specific recommended winter snow tire is applicable for their car together with a detailed price.

Marc's key take-away - for brands such as BMW If you're not mobile - you are not in touch with a whole generation.

Well worth a read by all those interested in seen how a major brand is successfully using mobile marketing campaigns.

2D barcoding poised to take off ?

While prevalent in Asia, especially in Japan where 76% of the population is familiar with camera‐phone based barcode scanning 2D bar-coding has been slow to take off in the US, largely due to the major carriers failing to agree on which standards to support. At last there is an indication that the mobile industry is close to reaching agreement. The CTIA Wireless Internet Caucus Code Scan Action Team (CCSAT) – has launched a white paper on Camera‐phone Barcode Scanning

The technical building blocks described in the paper are intended to kick‐start the market. In the near term, an effective 2D barcode service will requires coordination among code publishers, technology service providers and the carriers,

The CCSAT group has agreed to help provide standardized and reliable 2D barcode services in the United States. It has agreed to coordinate the creation of a Central Registry and Clearing House, the adoption of initial code symbologies, and rules governing the use of a Service Mark.

The two initial codes selected are the proprietary code, EZ Code and Data Matrix, an ISO supported standard code.

2D bar-code readers from companies such as Scanlife have started to become popular, on the iPhone

2D scanning is one of several initiatives to link the physical to the digital via the camera in smartphones - other technologies to watch include - image recognition from companies such as SnapTell, Mobiglyphs and other advertising enhancing services such as ShopText and SNIPP

Magazines such as Billboard and Car and Driver are testing out 2D codes

Apple iPhone is the fastest growing device in the world

AdMob, today highlighted the rapid and global growth of smartphone usage in their August 2008 AdMob Mobile Metrics Report.

The anticipated launch of new smartphones in the coming months, including the first of Google’s Android phones, the RIM Bold, and the Nokia N96, is a strong indication that this growth is likely to continue throughout the year.

According to the report, the Apple iPhone was the fastest growing device in the world last month and ended August with more than 2.9 million requests per day. Worldwide Smartphones accounted for 25.8 percent of traffic in August, up 3.4 percent since May 2008. The top five smartphones in the US – the BlackBerry Pearl, Palm Centro, BlackBerry Curve, Apple iPhone, and Samsung Instinct – generated 12.9 percent of all US traffic in August, a 2.4 percent increase over July.

Other highlights from the August 2008 report:

• Nokia has 62.4 percent of worldwide smartphone traffic in August, with more than 50 percent in every region except North America. In the US, Nokia does not have a top 20 ranked smartphone.

• RIM is in second place worldwide with 10.8 percent of smartphone traffic with the large majority of that coming from North America. RIM leads in the US with 31.2 percent of smartphone traffic and manufactures three of the top 10 devices.

• Motorola and SonyEriccson have a large share of overall mobile traffic, but neither has a smartphone ranked in the top 20 worldwide.

• Smartphones continue to increase marketshare in the US, accounting for 23.7 percent of traffic in August, up 3.5 percent since May 2008.

The full August 2008 report with additional details and all previous reports are available for free download at: www.admob.com/metrics

40 years of Computerworld on Google

Google announced yesterday their newspaper archive program

As noted by The New York Times Google is working with more than 100 newspapers including partners such as Heritage Microfilm and ProQuest, which aggregate historical newspaper archives in microfilm. Google has already scanned millions of articles.

IDG's flagship title, Computerworld is part of the program and all issues, stretching back over 40 years are available. Check out the first issue that was published on 21st June 1967.

Google's willingness to bear the digitalization cost and to share revenues made it an easy decision to allow Google to archive the content. Now, Computerworld in partnership with Google has been able to provide a great resource for those interested in researching the computer industry.

Google aims at the heart of Microsoft

The announcement that Google was launching a web browser to compete with IE, Firefox etc got the tech blogosphere all excited today. The majority of the early reports focused on Google Chrome's strength and weaknesses as a Web browser and replacement for current web browsers. Pundits such as TechCrunch blogger Mike Arrington suggested that it needed to be "nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete with Windows." Because Google has built its own JavaScript engine, Arrington suggested, Ajax applications like Gmail and Google Docs should "absolutely roar," When combined with Google Gears -- which provides offline access to Web apps -- Chrome becomes a potential "Windows killer," While, that's certainly an important by-product of the strategy, I believe that his and other commentary generally miss the long-term play which is all about mobile.

Futurists suggest that the real long-term play is around the browser and the applications that will run on the mobile platform (Android from a Google perspective).

Google has made little secret about attempting to dominate the mobile advertising space. According to Eric Schmidt “It’s the recreation of the Internet, it’s the recreation of the PC story, and it is before us — and it is very likely it will happen in the next year.” He postulates that Mobile advertising is nearing its tipping point because of features such as location-based advertising

While mobile is an immature and nascent market with limited advertising revenues today, Google is more bullish than most. Google fully understands it must set a strategy to dominate this platform. It took years for Microsoft to even recognize that it should be focusing on the Internet - and even after realizing where they should place their energies they were not particularly successful.

Now the chess board is being reset. Google has dominance in search, it has the largest ad serving platform utilizing both the premium Double Click Service as well as the Google Ad Manger, it can push ads via multiple mediums. Its got an open source browser that can be online and mobile based, it's building an analytics platform than can measure engagement and ROI - targeting ads to users' contextual experiences. Google is looking to ads in mobile search and location based service, in mobile video, in mobile applications and on mobile internet pages.

Building both online and mobile OSs and browsers, Google is aiming at squarely at Windows Desktop and Windows Mobile OS, IE, Microsoft Office, Live Search, Atlas Ad Serving, Microsoft Ad Center, Hotmail...............

Google will rightly argue that it's all about the user experience - that's the starting point - then it's all about the ad revenue.

Google Chrome - A New Browser

Taking aim at Microsoft, on Tuesday Sept, 2nd Google will formally announce an open source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Google announced that the beta version of the browser, called Google Chrome, will launch in 100 countries. Initially Google Chrome will be available for Windows users as part of a test-run to "start the broader discussion," Versions for Mac and Linux OSs are expected.

The news leaked out on Monday ahead of the official announcement.
A 38-page, online comic book that provided details about Chrome hit the blogosphere Monday morning, because Google had "hit 'send' a bit early".

According to Information Week, Google Chrome's debut answers a 16-month mystery: Why did Google buy GreenBorder Technologies?

Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media

Just becoming available,Tomi Ahonen's book "Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media" crisply describes how mobile devices will change the media landscape and presents new thinking about how brands and advertisers will communicate with consumers in the future.
The book will be available from Amazon UK in September and Amazon US in Oct.

I'm a huge believer in the future of mobile. Mobile devices bring together mobility, location, imaging, communications and the internet. Mobile devices are personal, always on, always with you, they know where you are, they allow you to capture, creative and share content and to interact via the camera with physical objects, to communicate with your mobile social and business networks and they operate as a digital wallet - the opportunities are just enormous.

Mobile internet devices from smartphones, to netbooks and mobile tablets, to ultra mobile multimedia computers, to light weight computers will embrace and extend the internet while moving more power and control to the consumer.

Already, there are twice as many cellphones as TV sets, three times as many cellphone subscribers as internet users, four times as many cellphones as PC sets and five times as many cellphones as automobiles.

Now even embraced by a potential future President, Barack Obama, recognizing its communications power, used SMS to announce Joe Biden as his Vice President selection. The world record campaign reached an audience of 2.9 million setting a world record.

As I note in the book endorsement:

“Tomi's book takes us through the changes and opportunities in this new converged world of voice, data and broadcast media. With fascinating examples from around the world he lays out the potential for an industry that could become one of the largest in the world. Anyone who is interested in the future of mobile should read this book.” Colin Crawford, Executive VP Interactive, IDG Communications USA

The foreword (By Pekka Ala-Pietila of Blyk), intro chapter, fourth chapter, and one case study (Flirtomatic) are available to preview.

I highly recommend reading Tomi's book but even more importantly, I encourage you to think about and join the conversation about the impact of mobile on your personal and business lives.

Guide to mobile search published by MMA

As noted by UTalkMarketing, the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA)has launched a white paper on mobile search.

The white paper, which was developed by the MMA’s Mobile Search Task Force, provides an overview of search on the mobile Internet, outlining how it differs from traditional web-based search, how it meets the needs of consumers and the opportunity it provides to operators and marketers. It also discusses mobile search challenges, strategies and business models, incorporating case studies from JumpTap and Medio Systems Inc.

The white paper is just one of the MMA’s extensive library of information and resources from basics such as the Mobile Marketing Industry Overview and the more advanced MMA International Journal of Mobile Marketing.

The Dawning of Mobile Advertising

Good overview from Chuck Levine

Chuck Levine's Mobile Presentation

view presentationtags: mobile advertising

Mobile browsing varies by region

According to a report recently released by Nielsen entertainment, gaming and music websites rank among the top five categories visited in all four BRIC countries, but do not have a place among the top US and Europe rankings. Users in mature markets such as America and Europe look to information and news

Email, weather, news, and search are the top categories for both American and European mobile Internet users; in the US, entertainment, music, and games place eighth, ninth, and tenth respectively. The findings suggest that mobile Internet users across BRIC countries are more reliant on mobile phones to provide them with entertainment content, while users across the United States and Europe view their devices as a resource for information.

“In the U.S. and Europe, broad access to media and entertainment has been available for decades through a large fixed distribution infrastructure, and more recently in specialized devices like iPods, to meet consumer’s entertainment needs,” said Jeff Herrmann, vice president of mobile media at Nielsen. “Users in the growing Brazil, Russia, India, and China markets haven’t had the benefit of broad-based content distribution thereby limiting their exposure, and are filling the service gap by embracing mobile’s transition into a personal entertainment platform.”

The report also covers mobile internet penetration - showing the US leading at 15.6%, followed by the UK at 12.9%

A Mobile Advertising Overview

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has recently released the IAB Mobile Platform Status Report which focuses on mobile display advertising, examining this dynamic market as it stands during the summer of 2008.

The report illustrates mobile advertising considerations and outlines advertising opportunities for mobile devices, from the perspective of established interactive advertising on the Web. It will focus on the following questions:

• WHAT IS MOBILE ADVERTISING? Understand the mobile landscape, who is using mobile applications, and the key mobile interactive advertising opportunities that exist today.

• WHAT DOES THE ECOSYSTEM LOOK LIKE? Learn about the chain of intermediaries that connect advertisers with consumers, and how it is similar to, and different from, the PC-based Web.

• HOW CAN MARKETERS REACH THE MOBILE CONSUMER? Differentiate the technical and market factors of mobile advertising to identify the best opportunities for different brands and campaign goals.

• WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD? Identify key trends on this evolving platform, with an eye to how mobile advertising opportunities will expand over the next five years.

Download IAB Platform Status Report: A Mobile Advertising Overview

A focus on mobile media

Over my career in media, which stretches back to 1987, most of the time I've been involved with print publishing both in the UK at Dennis Publishing and with IDG in the US. However, over the last several years I've focused more on online opportunities, assisting IDG Communications move from being a print centric to a mobile centric organization - my post in February 2007 got a fair amount of coverage thanks to a pick-up by Jeff Jarvis. Today IDG has around 45% of its US revenues coming online and it's been exciting to watch all the developments around search, advertising, lead generation and most importantly the engagement and interactivity of the audiences.

Today IDG focuses not only on developing great content at the brands' sites but also has a major effort syndicating content around the web - ensuring the content reaches audiences that are more and more dispersed and fragmented. Our goal is "user generated circulation" , a term coined by IDG's Frank Cutitta, who runs IDG Connect at the Circulation Management Conference and Expo. While there is still a major focus on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) the volume of traffic being received from SMO (Social Media Optimization) is nowvery significant. Create great content - but make sure you market it to the correct places and make it easy to be distributed via RSS. Tools such the one from ShareThis should be on virtually every piece of content. Audience development has now pushed out circulation management.

Coupled with our focus on content syndication, IDG has launched the IDG Technology Network - a Vertical Publishing Network for the IT industry. Anchored by IDG's core brands IDG has carefully selected and vetted sites that complement our brands' sites with those that also have a high affinity with the brands' audience. Through the network IDG provides marketers with unparalleled reach to highly quality and active IT buyers. Details on these initiatives can be found at the IDG Knowledge Hub.

During 2008 I've been more and more focused around mobile opportunities trying to understand exactly what the mobile platform means for publishers. In many ways it feels similar to when I arrived in the US in 1993 - the web was in its nascent stage - although a clickable ad appeared in 1993 r - banner ads did not appear until October 1994 when HotWired ran one for AT&T. But, even back then many of us realized that we were witnessing the beginnings of a massive upheaval to our industry and new revenue streams. We just had no clear ideal of how it would develop. If we had, we'd have launched a search engine with paid text ads.

Fifteen years on I feel similarly about the mobile space - while at a nascent stage in many areas - there are already significant revenue streams via SMS and MMS. Now we just have to crack the code on mobile advertising in a way that engages not aggravates and interrupts the mobile user.

If you want some great insights into Mobile Advertising read Mobile Advertising: Supercharge Your Brand in the Exploding Wireless Market by by Chetan Sharma, Joe Herzog and Victor Melfi.

The launch of the iPhone enabled easy navigation of the web via a mobile screen and now with a developer environment coupled with a distribution and payment platform for these mobile applications Apple has redefined the space. 60 million applications have been downloaded since launch ! It has raised the bar high, so I await with interest the responses from Nokia and the other major players.

Going forward, I'm going to be focusing my energies more an more on mobile and in particular what it means for media organizations. As Tomi Ahonen has noted, mobile is the 7th Mass Media - capable of the elements of all previous mass media but also a lot more.

I'll use this blog to highlight interesting trends, people, products, applicatons and services in the mobile environment. To start off I'll provide a link to those sites I have on my iGoogle Mobile Tab - I find it a useful resource so keep abreast of this fast moving environment. It's not comprehensive so please feel free to send details of other interesting sites.

I'm sensing that the moment is coming very soon where all major publishing companies are going to have to take mobile seriously - too may failed to appreciate the upheaval caused by online - mobile is going be even more traumatic as we move from one PC era - that of Personal Computer to another one - that of Personal Communications. It's going to be an exciting journey I how you join me in the conversation.

LA Fire Department's aTwitter with Web 2.0

Appears that the Los Angeles fire department is on the cutting edge of Web 2.0, with a wave of innovation that has moved the internet away from the static screen and helped turn it into a dynamic, world-wide community.

Projects include a Flickr group, a YouTube channel, a blog, Gabcast and Jaiku. Also under consideration is a Twitter disaster feed for LA residents, not a bad idea where cataclysmic earthquakes, fires, rains and mudslides are part of the SoCal life.

With the Twitter feed every time fire trucks roll or rescue helicopters fly in the city, details of the emergency go out on Twitter. It will be interesting to see how popular this becomes - currently the volume of followers is just under 1,000.