Changing contents formats and structure in order to create new and more “sellable” products is a possibility for incremental revenue generation we should follow up closely. Digital Newsbook Publishing Project is an attempt to standarize a format so that dynamic contents from newspapers can be brought into more “static” devices like e-readers. That means, trying to adapt contents to an additional user experience taking into account current multiplatform realities. This way of distributing contents, even when it could theoretically cannibalize part of our business is basically an incremental channel. It is similar to creating podcasts from texts.

There is a value creation adapting contents to different usages and platforms, this is widely known. Opening up to allow others to use contents to find new ways of selling them, for the moment, is the right thing to do to encourage research on contents monetization before doing things in-house. Allowing third parties to innovate with our contents is a way of fostering research in our business, and doing it together with our competitors’ just underline that coopetition and media convergence that we have repeatedly outlined. 

Getting more juice from our created contents is the only way of capitalizing (and demonstrating) our higher quality contents.

——-

By the way, after stop posting any original contents, I am back. I have been preparing my GMAT (I got 660 in my first attempt) and my TOEFL (still waiting for results).

Great post describing an initiative on mass customization applied to newspaper. I still remember how in my business school we studied mass-customization around Dell. Dell offered capabilities to final customers to set up their hardware requirements and they would get a product that would better fit them. But also, I remember this was the case for pizza delivery because you may choose the ingredients.

The initiative consists in:

You register online and select up to seven newspaper sections by checking a box. (…)
The participating newspapers deliver their product in PDF format to the Swiss Post, which then sends them to Syntops where the company’s custom software, Syntops GmbH, assembles individualized PDFs. The PDFs are printed and dropped off to Swiss Post by 7 a.m. for delivery to the home by 11 a.m. There also is a digital version of Personal News available online.

In terms of technology, it’s a kind of DM with more contents; it’s not as complex as it may appear if there is a good information management.  Advantages of this system would be to make a more relevant newspaper and to have better possibilities for advertising targeting.

Being an interesting attempt of innovating in newspaper industry, we get to a kind of print on demand service. This is an already existing commodity service.  Printing is not necessary for most contents, and, if you heavily use e-ink, like I do, printed books and papers become something even inconvenient. It is possible to syndicate your favourite sources online, to easily build up a .txt very light file and to carry it on your ereader and you don’t need to pay nor to get any advertisement.

I like the idea of the newspapers offering a customized newspaper, but, as information gathering literacy spreads, and audience mature, they will be more able to reach their sources without any third party involved in this process. In fact, I would prefer to make a comment on mass customization more than in this concrete initiative.

The key is still having powerful contents and values so that people chose us as a reliable source. The power to aggregate is in users’ hands. We may provide tools (like bloglines, netvibes or google reader) but what we have to give them is powerful contents.

Quality media will find in mass customization a huge opportunity. Being an opinion maker, a leader in a market will make a media chosen even by the people who may disagree with their statements.  In fact, by supporting those statements or by opposition, with a clear standpoint, media can become catch-all  (catch-all is a concept taken from Political Science). Catching all audiences  widen reach and opens up a difficult entry barrier to competitors.

Catch-all media, like catch-all political parties, will tend to lead and aggregate people preferences. Mass customization is the opportunity for catch-all media to be not just in your traditional audience, but to get constantly into an incremental sector of audience that was always approaching your contents from the other side, and before, they never bought us in paper.

Credits: CC image by inju

What do you find when you look around at the supermarket? If you look carefully to product tags, you will find Unilever, L’ORÉAL, Procter&Gamble, and a bunch of corporations that virtually control everybrand in every product category in each market around the world. When it comes to media (even some people already worry on Media concentration as a potential problem for democracy, and that would be a topic for another post) we still find a group of more or less isolated smaller corporations at least, by language communities. New Information Systems and Technologies (not just Internet), open ways to integrate projects and cooperate profiting from economies of scale that would still help transforming media businesses and making it sustainable by reducing costs. This may be one of the reasons why, even being spanish, I insist in blogging in English. I really see no point on continuing with local, or regional (defining region as a linguistici community) in media business organizations. We can be local in news, but global in corporations, and, my view is that global multiplatform corporations would be necessary to have stronger media and a more independent journalism around the world.

This is just a brief note to advance my coming posts that will try to develop my point of view on how, as media businesses, we could improve our efficiency to serve a better (and cheaper) product to final customers through global integration:

(i): Digital convergence should lead us to Media (organizations) convergence

(ii) Currently, cross border media integration is under-developed (exception made of new/pure players online)

(iii) Digital convergence has a logical evolution towards integration (softer or harder integration, depends). If not merging, Media should integrate in information systems and, still, traditional media could contribute creating standards that would put them in a situation of privilege.

CC image by ntr23

On PowerPoint, a business plan that monetizes content generated by users can provide us with a wonderful business model of potentially unlimited scalability and a cost structure sustainable from the beginning.

It seems something like this was the idea behind JPG which we now read in GigaOm (through Journalism.co.uk) wanted to print a magazine with content generated and selected online by a community of users. Either it was too early for this project (but, honestly, are we going to print anything in a couple of years?), other say it is early because advertisers still do not want to invest in user generated sites, or it may just be not so easy to sustain businesses based in content generated by users.

I did work in an user generated content business (eBay, and yes, I still remember when I had to face all Spanish powersellers and their problems with the last update of Turbolister) and I know it’s not easy, and it is already recognized that social networks will be soon in trouble if they do not find cash. We also know that youtube (ugc) is performing in terms of finance much worse than hulu (professional content).

The truth is that it is still uncertain to assure that user generated content will be a gold mine while professional content is death. In fact, the demonstration that the long tail did not arrive yet they way they told us also supports the great difficulty to build up sustainable models based in user generated content.

In fact, the distinction between user generated and professional content is quite unfair very often, Shakespeare or Cervantes were not “users”? Why do we need to draw such a line? That line that separates UGC from professional content is more a concept invented to convince investors than a reality. When we talk about UGC we mainly mean contents done for free than I can exploit, no matter they were created by a Nobel prize or by my grandmother. Why am I talking about this?

Because behind the euphemism UGC many projects and business plans have been based (and I accuse myself in the first part becuase I have also produced and defended business ideas heavily based on UGC). Trying to build top-down a business place thinking that it will encourage a community to emerge is like, we say in spain: building the house from the roof. Communities, by definition, have at least a partially bottom-up growth, if not, more than a community they are a kind of army.

Well, I have to say I have seen how tuenti was created top-down and now it is a complete success (apparently).

It may be possible to build on communities but really difficult to create them from scratch. I would invest -honestly- little in user generated content, because it is difficult to control and always out of your hands.

Even if we feel very sorry for the closed company and its workers and investors, we have, as a society, to try learning on the experiences the others are  having to not repeat the same mistake. Having said that, I have to admit 8 y 10 new ventures right now are probably making this mistake. My guess is that we are going to see many UGC based business closing during the coming years and a couple of winners. I know it sounds crazy, but I even imagine youtube with a similar luck or with a radical model transformation.

Let’s leave this post online and see what happens!

(by the way, if you want to invest in a not completely user generated content business plan in Spain, let me know )

In communication, media (Singular: Medium) are the storage and transmission tools used to store and deliver information or data. It is often referred to as synonymous with mass media or news media, but may refer to a single medium used to communicate any data for any purpose. (wikipedia)

Following this definition that wikipedia borrowed from 3 different dictionaries, media is a set of tools to store and deliver information or data. But, more than merely data, media delivers data put into context, or, what Popper calls world 3 knowledge and Craig McDonald concretize in “statements”. Popper’s 3 worlds of knowledge are helpful to understand what is media. According to this cosmology we have 3 worlds of knowledge:

world 1: physical universe

world 2: subjective personal perceptions. Mental procedures to buid thinking.

world 3: statements. Those productions expressed through language, descriptions. Necessarily, statements are related to a context.

Therefore, media is something from worlds 1 and 2 that composed of world 3. The process through which media allows statements to be sent from one to another is communication. In order to have a complete communication, we need a common code of symbols and values. There may be lower levels of communication when there are less shared values and symbols. Therefore, communication is very much related to common values and symbols. Values and Symbols play a central role in Media.

Men lived in a world of direct communications centuries ago, then in a world of mediated oral communication through tales, leyends or songs… we lived later on a continuous technological improvement: ink, paper, printing… information technologies… we have reached more capacity to communicate (data) than ever. But communication remains to be the same, because what we are doing is just to put knowledge in common, statements, not just data. The fact that we can transfer more data in a given second does not necessarily mean we are transferring more meaningful information (statements), it may just mean that statements are more clearly defined or supported. Our business is more in statements than in data, or, to make it easier, in what we communicate than in how we communicate it.

It is of a great relevance in order to understand what is this business about, to have a clear idea of what is communication. Media exist because there is a need for communication, and so we need vehicles to communicate. The end, the goal, is to communicate statements. Producing a sustainable media, is a result of a successful communication process. Accordingly, media business developers are a medium, a resource, not a goal. Our goal as online media is to communicate as much as we can to as many people as we can, then, because there is a lot of communication going on, we monetize it making it a sustainable and profitable business.