This is an interesting move:
Business-to-business publisher United Business Media (UBM) is to sell its UK farming and medical titles to Briefing Media, the owner of TheMediaBriefing, for £10 million.
So, Briefing Media, an online and events business up until now gains some traditional brands, and UBM continues its shift away from traditional publishing towards events. The shape of the B2B market is changing with ever-increasing speed...
Ron Diorio, VP of business development & innovation director, Economist Media Group
What is a platform? asked Ron, rattling through a list of OSes, apps and social networks, to a mixed response from the audience - there was no clear agreement as to what a platform is. The Economist Media Group publishes both text and date, and he works on both. The scope of their publishing through pretty much every device you can think of is challenging. They've just started working with SoundCloud to figure out how to socialise their audio content.
How can they take the data they have in the magazine and the organisation to create apps? My MBA allowed potential students to set their own preferences for ranking criteria. They're about to launch an iPad app called The World in Figures. A book to an app? They actually extract the data from the file they get back from the printer...
They're aiming to have continuity of experience across the different platforms. And they need rational pricing structures.
The World in 2012 was a straight conversion of the annual supplement. In June they started working with the editorial team to build a highlights app, and drive sales of the paper magazine. Intelligent Life. Great experience. His kids were really, really excited about him working on apps. His daughter read him reviews over the breakfast table... Electionism is an application they're building with multiple partners, allowing them to bring both their content and aggregation together in one place. It's an experiment in tablet publishing.
Lucia Adams, digital development editor. The Times
In the summer of 2009, all the digital journalists were called together, and told that a group of them were being sent into a bunker to work on the new version of the site. Not only were they implementing a paywall, but they would be a launch partner for the iPad in the UK... The engines of Wapping were in overdrive. They were doing two major things without precedent.
We knew that the iPad would have loads of exciting features - you could shake it to make it do things. Every time they ran up to James Harding with new features, they cam back simpler and simpler. It came to resemble the newspaper. It was the same at 9pm as it was at 6am. And some readers enjoy the linear experience that brings. No decisions to make... Like the newspaper it's put together by a dedicated team, who hand craft it. And the beginning the development was very fast. The experts in the team could see that a photo needed to be 5 pixels wider.
The iPads they were working with as they developed it were bolted to the desk. It was still a secret device. They were buildings things on an untried platform, with no existing support tools. And it's stayed in the top 10 grossing apps list.
They've had problems with the Kindle edition. They had to get the R&D lab to spend two weeks on it. It's out there - so you have to get it fixed. And they've not been able to find a way to get the Kindle edition into the general subs package.
They now have The Times in seven different formats. They're allowing the readers to choose - they're not dictating where people read particular things.
Douglas Arellanes, Sourcefabric
They're trying to Open Source news... They're an NGO, trying to lower the barriers to entry so that smaller organisations can punch above their weight in news. And it's to do with the least sexy bits of getting news online - the back end, the plumbing. Workflow needs to be built around content and not the other way around. In existing workflows, the technology determines the content. They try to reverse that, making it more natural for the journalists.
There are so many new platforms emerging that you need to be ready for anything. Make your system modular, tie them together with APIs, and make those APIs as rational as possible. When Basler Zeitung - a Swiss newspaper - was taken over by a right wing politician, the editorial team walked to set up by themselves as Tages Woche. Sourcefabric built Superdesk to bring the workflows together and manage print and web output from one CMS.
Ingest: Wires, data, APIS --> Process: create one, publish everywhere --> Output: every channel
Open source means free software (but someone from the audience disagrees). But more than that, you're free to tinker with it and modify it to your purposes. You create a community of interest around the software. They may be half way around the world, but they're dealing with the same issues as you. You can share this effort.
They are about to launch a new product called <name under trademark dispute>. It's a solution for book publishing, be it print or ebooks...
Mike Goldsmith, editor in chief of iPad and tablet editions, Future
Should you be on iPad/Kindle/Nook? Yes. What should you do...? Ah. Interesting question.
Newsstands are good things for publishers. Rectangles made of glass are a lot like rectangles made of paper.
Future's publishing? Interactive editions: T3 (Woodwing), Guitarist Deluxe (Adobe DPS) and Tap! (their own platform). Digital replicas: 65 titles.
So... which is best? Digital replicas allow you to learn. Then you can (if the demand is there) upscale to an interactive edition and start to innovate.
There are new readers for you out there...
Alex Watson, head of app development, Dennis
Apple's Newsstand is a retail environment. Prior to it, you were just another app in the App Store. It is more of a retail shopping experience than we're used to with the rest of the web. $400,000 in consumer revenue since the launch of Newsstand. 17 titles, after the Apple cut and VAT. BUT - people want free samples, and the download costs of millions of free issues is expensive. They were over-whelmed by technical support from the start. iOS users expect bullet-proof reliability - and they expect platform-specific features and big production qualities. You will be judged against Flipboard - and it took more in VC than Dennis did in revenue last year.
Also, advertisers are very sceptical of "page turners" - PDF replicas of your magazine. Dennis's approach was a mix of quality and quality. Pretty much all their titles are on newsstand, bar those that there are content issues with Apple (Poker, alternative lifestyle). Some development of their own, some off the shelf solutions. They're using Pixelmags for the page-turners. (and The Week is PugPig-based).
Don't get carried away with the short term success of page-turners. $16,000 in revenue, 47k app download, no extra ad revenue.
The dedicated iOS designed one? 53k app download, $100,000 revenue plus advertising... Quality pays off here.
Next steps? Apple will sell more of these devices. People expect Newsstand. People will accept page-turners, but quality pays off.
Newsstand: Good for publishers, Apple and your users. But always think of your users.
Tom Standage, digital editor, The Economist
Not a magazine about economics - an attempt to be a weekly newspaper for the world. They're growing both print and digital circulations. 300k people using the app every week. One third of the print readers are using the app regularly. "digital is not a zero-sum game". The main reason people cancel the subscription is because they can't keep up with the issues coming through. With digital editions, they can consume the magazine in new ways - the audio edition, for example. You can listen to it while jogging, you can read it on an iPhone, you can read it on an iPad. Great for customer retention. They're encouraging people to think they're subscribing to a weekly bundle of content, not to a magazine.
77% of digital subscribers are new to The Economist. 12% are lapsed print subscribers. The Kindle? A bookshop in your bag. People carry it around,a nd pay for content. iOS users are happy to pap for apps. There's more opportunity here than there is on the web. Finishability is important - the catharsis of getting to the end of the magazine. The web has no end. Readers are creatures of habit, and they like to read at specific times of the week. It's lean-back 2.0. The iPad app is read for long periods. Most people spend between and hour and and hour and a half.
One the web? Metered paywall - essential for sharing on social media. 5 story a week meter. Search referrals went up. Really promising model - works well for them. You need to know who your readers are to get a good print/digital synergy going.
Chris Newell, Impulse Pay
If you get the "Buy Now" barrier wrong, you'll get low conversion rates. The average credit card takes 120 keystrokes to do a transaction. So their solution adds the cost to the mobile phone bill. Claims 50% conversion rate increase over PayPal. You get paid after 45 days, and get paid at least 75% of the tariff amount.
Francois Nel, researcher and academic
Alchemy of business models. Alchemists have a bad reputation. Most were well-meaning intelligent scientists. They were experimenting to find ways of changing elements. So it is with business model innovators. Can we find some underlying principles?
The key is reciprocity.
Sharing is caring - a key principle of personal AND business relationships. The core part of all business is the ability to give something back. Claude Lévi-Strauss's ideas: human beings are wired to follow rules, and reciprocity is the simplest way to create these rules that bind us together.
Media executives are planning on concentrating on new products and streamlining workflows. Write once, publish many - but with fewer people. The top five opportunities are about social, local, mobile - solomo. Media executives are smart - but at what price? To paywall or not to paywall is not a very sophisticated way of framing the discussion. We've always had different value propositions at different price points.
Business models are not just revenue - they're a way of thinking. Daily Mail - down 4.63% in print. One of the lowest declines. Online? Up 58.89%. Meteoric! The upshot is that they're making £75m profit. The Guardian is down 14.10% in print. Up 31.45% online. Huge amount of time and money on social, leaders on Facebook with their app. Operating loss is £55m. The Guardian's output is admirable, but we have to ask ourselves where the revenue is.
The Mail app is free for 60 days. No integrated newsroom - separate teams for the two products. News agenda is different. The digital staff is small. They supplement the newspaper with the digital channel. The Guardian is offering you a substitute. One is a complementary strategy, one is a displacement/cannibalisation strategy.
But - new Guardian Facebook app. All the content. Is is complementary or cannibalisation? Facebook advertising doesn't belong to The Guardian. There's not a lot of love going back there...
We need to grow up. Users will start to understand the need for reciprocity in online relationships.
"So what?" asks the audience. There are lots of ways the audience can give back - money, data... We can't build sustainable relationship by only giving or only taking. There's plenty of money online - just because we're not looking for it in the right places, doesn't it mean it's not there.
Debate.
And the panel erupts into debate. Is The Guardian's model based on a Britain-only assumption? Do they need to cut journalism costs, as well as up their revenue? The Telegraph once made an offer for paper for a year and a huge discount. Yes, it got the guy fired who came up with idea - but it captured a huge database of readers, which was hugely valuable.
Will people realise that if they don't pay, these things they like will go away? Nel returns to the idea of growing up. Pity - a panel that started well ended up on "how do we save The Guardian?". There are bigger issues than that.
ABC is going to sell its new US series direct to UK iTunes users:
The much-anticipated new US thriller series "The River", from Steven Spielberg, and Oren Peli, the creator of "Paranormal Activity", is set to make its UK debut on iTunes (www.itunes.co.uk/tv/theriver) on 8th February, just 24 hours after its US broadcast on ABC. iTunes customers will be first in the UK to see this chilling drama series. A Season Pass of all eight episodes of the much-anticipated show will be available to pre-order from today, with episodes one and two launching on 8th February.
The UK networks - non of which have bought the show - are cut out completely. It'll be interesting to see how this goes...
Publishers do have lots of content, but a) there are lots of publishers (including online-only ones who have never put ink on paper in their lives) and b) there are lots of websites built purely to be packed with content to attract searching readers. (hint, they’re not called ’content farms’ for nothing). You’re competing against the other publishers for subscription and product revenues, and competing against the whole internet for advertising money (oh, and as Paul Conley explains, a lot of your advertisers are now using ‘content’ to go direct to consumers themselves). Someone will always be able to produce ‘content’ cheaper than you and get the eyeballs on it more cheaply than you can, and these ‘someones’ will be – and are – driving down the CPMs that volume advertisers will pay. (Chasing this revenue leads to what Breunig calls the ‘content crunch’, a downward spiral of cheaper content and lower revenues.)
A neat summary of the battle for attention and its casualties.
It's interesting to note that all of the full time jobs I've been in discussions about - and the vast majority of contracting work, too - have been around organisations producing content to talk to their customers and partners direct, and not in the journalism business. I think that shows where the growth is right now…
UK magazine publisher Future made $1 million in new tablet magazine revenue within a month of debuting 65 of its titles on iTunes' Newsstand
I wonder how long scientific publishers can cling to their existing models when they're eliciting this level of active hostility from their customers:
Once I did hear about Elsevier’s behaviour, I made a conscious decision not to publish in Elsevier journals and I started to feel bad about cooperating with them in any way. I didn’t go as far as to refuse, but if, say, I was asked to join the editorial board of an Elsevier journal and wasn’t quite sure I wanted to, then the fact that it was Elsevier was enough to make my mind up. (This actually happened. I was a little cowardly and gave it as an additional reason for reluctance rather than the main reason, but I did at least mention it.) I am not knowingly on the editorial board of any Elsevier journal, and haven’t been in the past either.
Stay for the comments, if you want to see a broader range of opinions.
I've noted a surge in posts about Open Access Publishing and other alternative methods of publishing scientific research over the last fortnight - anyone know why that might be?
When I left RBI at the end of last month, with my potted plant in my arms and a cheque in my back pocket, I realised that high on my priority list was figuring out exactly what I'd just spent the best part of six years doing. Wait. That sounds bad. I knew exactly what I'd been doing; I just wasn't sure how best to describe it to the outside world, especially as it's more than possible that my next employer won't be a journalism organisation. Outside that rarefied field, the job title "editorial development manager" doesn't mean much. I'm not sure it meant much even within that profession...
Fundamentally, I'd been working with content teams to help the define their content propositions for a digital, social and multiple-channel age. So... content strategy? Seemed like a good description, which begged the question: are there other people who define themselves in that way? A quick dose of the Googles proved that there were, and that they had a meetup and everything.
So I paid my fiver, trotted along and took some notes, sat alongside my arch-event blogging rival Martin "currybet" Belam. (Never quite figured out which of us is the super villain and which is the superhero. And that worries me.) These are pretty raw notes, typed rapidly into an iPad as the speakers, uh, spoke... They only had five minutes apiece, so the notes are by necessity rather brief. I found some talks compelling and insightful, and others rather obvious. No, I'm not telling you which are which. :-)
Mags Hanley
Mags rattled through the case study of a small business auditor who'd quit to launch to ForMums - a Chiswick-based hyperlocal and hyperniche site.
4 Things:
1. Kate doesn't have a proposition without a content strategy. The blog is the stickiness. Essential, because it brings people in, timely so it brings them back. What is a free listing? What is paid? What is the content for an advertiser? How much should it cost? All these things had to be decided.
2. Defining taregt audiences. There are gwo kinds of mums in Chiswick. Yummy mummies, who stay at home on their partner's income, and then the dual income families. Second audience is local businesses. And how do we ensure it's not overwhelming for Kate herself?
3. How do we get the structure right, so it old be sold to other areas? Kate intended to sell franchises to other West London areas.
4. Reviewing the tactical - what should she do every week? Every month? The event schedule was critical.
Tom Bamford
Semantic content - do we give people too much choice on their writing toolbars. It's distraction-free. Proper content is good for SEO. It's also accessible. Basically a quick rattle through familiar semantic markup.
David Farbey
Websites are what corporations do to talk to their customers. They're great because you can get all sorts of information out of them. The websites at probably only 10% of the content being produced by a corporation. People don't realise they're creating content; it's a sales pitch, or a presentation, or a user guide... and they're all working in silos.
Lots of the "back" content on your site is from the rest of the organisation. So you need to work with people to find what they've got that you can work with.
Steve Parks
Open Source CMSes in Enterprise. Advice: collaboration. Teams working together, collaborating with the community. Gartner spoke to 500 IT leaders. Essentailly three thpe of software in use: Proprietary (provided by vendors) - Open Source - Internal (custom written for the company, usually by internal teams). In the years between the first time Gartner did the survey and the most recent, internal and OS have both grown at the expense of the proprietary. His theory is that Internal and Open Source can feed into each other. Companies can contribute code back as they build internal solutions on OS software. Three big platforms: Alfresco for document managers, Drupal for big sites, WordPress for smaller sites. Cited a Lullabot example (you reading Jeff? :-) ) in which Sony and Warner ended up collaborating on sites through shared code.
Rick Yagoditch
Context is the third part of the site. There's content, structure and context. Context brings meaning. If you don't understand your customer! You can't put content in context. Contextualisation has been hijacked by marketing - segmentation. Google tells you that you can't contextualise - one URL, one piece of content. But Google contextualises... Each context is a rock that diverts some of the stream. But how do you apply context to CMSes? They're built on segmentation. Context needs to happen on the word level, not the page level. You have to contextualise for your customers.
Continue reading Content Strategy, Like Lightning....
Peter Buckley of Dorling Kindersley appears to have his head screwed on straight:
Flat content. That assumption that “something else will come along” is also driving what Buckley calls the “flat” content model: that is, content is increasingly conceived and created with a view to it potentially getting used in a number of ways—whether as an app, an e-book, a website, or even a printed tome. What’s also interesting is that Buckley appeared less preoccupied with what “the next big platform” might be—just that his company is prepared for it, regardless.
Anyone with a serious stake in content production should be doing everything they can to structure their content production and storage so as to create a content platform layer that can be expressed through multiple output channels. As those channels proliferate with ever-increasing speed, it's the only economically sensible method of managing the change.
