Jack Matthews, chief executive of the ANZ publisher’s Fairfax Digital division says digital revenue models are becoming more varied and constantly changing: “We believe transaction models are the new rivers of gold, and that you will conclude that there is far more upside than risk.”
But while contrasting this year’s much more upbeat environment with last’s, he warned that “everything is not back to normal: There’s a new normal. We’re facing the biggest disruptive change since Gutenberg,” he says.
The tightly-planned day’s programme – organised with XMedia Lab – presented the thoughts of some of the digital industry’s thought leaders in a series of quick-fire and inspirational presentations.
From Associated Northcliffe Digital in London, chief executive Richard Titus mused on the “very personal, very social” nature of the mobile in what he calls the new experience paradigm.
Already for example, the BBC’s iPlayer fires up your TV to allow you to continue watching the programme which had occupied you via your mobile, on the journey home. He says meta data is publishers’ key asset, enabling a single customer view, “so I can deliver valuable messages to you”.
Not just the content, but the filter becomes critical as attention, he says, becomes the biggest scarcity.
Marc Frons, chief technology officer of the New York Times’ digital operations, is responsible for eight platforms, some of which are paid. “We consider the iPad a revolutionary device, combining the best of print and online in a single package,” he says. “The first device that captures the readability of print.”
Engagement is the key metric for websites: “We’re experimenting with ways to filter content”.
The NYT has also partnered the developer community, issuing almost 10,000 API keys to the 11,000 users of its developer network.
“We think these engagement efforts have paid off.”
The need for change has been driven by recognition that “we can’t succeed through online advertising alone.” Asking loyal readers to pay isn’t punishing them; it’s “an investment in quality content we believe they will be willing to make,” he says. “The metered model is the most flexible of any we announced, and will bundle web, mobile and archive.
Nic Fulton, chief scientist of Thomson Reuters (which has turnover of $14 billion and “rather lovely” profits of $3 billion) and self-confessed geek, admits as a scientist he hadn’t thought about the business model of the web. The division was allowed to take risks, and had even created a bureau and distribution network on Second Life, before interest in the virtual community dwindled. Other experiments have included mixing news with dance tunes (Newsiq) and creating a financial glossary.
What of the future? Fulton believes augmented reality and remotes – giving users control of video-equipped vehicles – will be big... but may take a while.
His take on publishing is that today’s paper should be “about tomorrow’s news, not yesterday’s”. Digitally-printed newspapers “may only be a stopgap’ but Fulton says he still finds it hard to understand why he can’t buy ‘my newspaper’. “Maybe ‘vision’ is holding it back,” he says.
Nor was Media 2010’s content without some controversy: Adify president Russ Fradin spruiked his company’s advertising network services, only to have them roundly criticised by Schibsted’s Frederic Filoux as “bottom feeders”. Concerned that time spent viewing newspaper websites is decreasing, Filoux urged publishers to target their heaviest users, focus on the type of use and offer a better user experience, teaming it with ‘friction-free’ payment systems.
From Tokyo, Oliver Reichestein – a news website designer who runs the www.tputh.com website and “likes to push buttons” – said many sites were boring. He urged publishers to “have fun and people will get infected”.
Media 2010 was a pot pourri of ideas and interaction: There were contributions too, from Australian Simon Gallagher – who is international business development director of US online movie channel Hulu – and Al Jazeera new media head Moeed Ahmad.
A joint venture between News Corporation’s Fox, NBC, and now American ABC, Hulu has 200 content partners but is so far unable to get into Australia. And Ahmad says distributed distribution has been good for the Arab broadcaster, with Creative Commons licensing generating financial leads.
And a host of others including Suzanne Stefanac, director of the American Film Institute’s LA-based digital content lab, who demonstrated the passion of digital innovators with clips, one shot with a mobile phone.
Hard to leave without at least a handful of ideas for doing digital better... and a resolution to return to Media 2011 next year.
Peter Coleman (from GXpress March issue)
Mash up for the future, says Everyblock guru
Adrian Holovaty’s Media 2010 pitch was titled ‘three things media companies should be doing’.They could certainly learn from his own experience, which included developing Chicago’s Everyblock website, which aggregated public data and presented in an ultra-local geographic format.
You want to know where the mob action is, or barbershop crime – “bad haircuts excepted,” he says – Everyblock is the place to look for information, using data which Holovaty (pictured) had originally used in a 2006 Google maps mash-up’ for chicagocrime.org. “There are dozens of different kinds of information, which can be browsed in a variety of rich ways,’ he says.
The creator of Everyblock – and co-creator of Django – volunteered these ideas for the future:
• reorganising information: “None of the information we publish is original, and with automation, there is no ongoing cost,” he says. Six people now cover 11 US cities, writing ‘screenscrapers’ which gather data and reorganise it.
“Think about information that isn’t organised very well. The value is in the way the information is organised.” At the ‘Washington Post’, he worked on rollcall votes, a topic government, “doesn’t have an incentive to present well”;
• take a more long-term view of the news, rather than assuming that everyone knows the background to a story, by making an encyclopaedia article the main product, and supporting it with updates: “I challenge you to think about people who aren’t news junkies,’ he says. Journalists say it’s a lot of trouble, but do exactly this with canned obituaries;
•tame streams by filtering the substance from the garbage in sources such as Twitter. “Finding the nuggets of information is what media companies have always done,” he says