Proper blogroll finally added

Eventually, I have got round to constructing a proper blogroll. You’ll see some of the sites I enjoy reading added to the right hand column. Generally they focus on media, technology and search but there are a few other random ones in there.

Information wants to be free, err expensive, err… oh, never mind

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.  

During the course of my career in business media I have heard parts of this phrase trotted out on regular occasions to justify various publishing models. Generally the extracts have centred on the ‘information wants to be free part’ and have ignored the rest of the quote. It has proved to be a nice hook to hang digital publishing strategies on and one that has been adopted by the majority of the newspaper sites over recent years.

Now, with the collapse of advertising markets (especially print) it feels as though we’re at a tipping point for media businesses. Newspapers are leading the way but I am certain that they provide a blueprint for what is happening – albeit at a slightly slower pace – in the consumer and then the business media industries.

In my Delicious bookmarks I have been trying to keep track of the various articles from publishers arguing about raising the pay-wall for content, starting to charge micro-payments for articles or banding together into one giant co-operative to keep content out of Google’s results & earn a ‘fairer share’ of the revenue their content generates.

Interesting as these articles are I believe that they often deal with a fairly simple issue in an overly complicated way.

Media owners generally fall into three broad categories and each should approach the digital challenge in a distinct way.

Newspapers and general news titles – stay open access, revel in the millions of visitors you get, but change your business model, fast

If we go back to the quote above, the big problem for the media business seems to be that information – in its various guises but especially news – is increasingly commoditised. Search online for any news event and you’ll usually find someone covering it – be that a newspaper, blogger, the BBC, Google News or part of the specialist press. That’s the reality of a digital and networked world that we, in the developed world especially, live in. The genie won’t go back into the bottle. Putting a pay-wall up for this form of information will never work. Micro-payments will never work. Publishers who have traditionally relied upon earning premium rates for selling advertising around this commoditised content had better reinvent their business model quickly. In this blog I have suggested a few ways in which they might look to do this but generally I think this involves a fundamental change of mindset.

The major newspaper businesses need to stop crying foul, stop pining for a bygone age & see that they have a great advantage over lesser information providers in the way that Google and other search engines afford them ‘authority status’ and deliver huge numbers of interested readers. Their priority has to be in figuring out the ways to monetise this traffic. Something that I think the vast majority of them do very badly.

Specialist information providers – put your content behind a pay-wall and continually try to move further up the value chain

At the other end of the media spectrum is highly specialised, ultra-niche content, tools and analysis. Here, the further you delve into a niche, and the more you do to enhance the content away from pure news, the scarcer the content becomes and generally its value increases. Pay-walls work. It also helps that, in business markets certainly, the end user can claim the cost of purchasing as a company business expense; which is why parallels between the Wall Street Journal and FT’s pricing policy are irrelevant to other newspaper operations.

Large sections of the media business that operate in this area are finding their companies have been pretty robust during the recession. They work with subscription models and so long as they keep innovating and really concentrate on providing ‘must have’ information their businesses should prosper.

Those in between – develop a hybrid model

This applies to those publishers who are caught  in the middle of the 2 groups I mentioned above. They neither generate a high volume of traffic nor produce vital must have information but they often have a strong brand in a vertical business or consumer market (maybe with 4 or 5 other key information providers or international competition). While the challenge here is a big one I also think that strategically the way forwards is clear.  

Media owners in this sector need to segment their audience and increasingly apply the ‘freemium’ model. The majority of their content should be open access (and well optimised) but every opportunity should be made to use this content as a prospect gathering device. Depending on your market these could include e-mail newsletters, downloadable white-papers, recipe planners or holiday guides. Then, around the edges of this free offering the publishers need to identify and build upon additional paid -for information needs. This could be sections of premium content, related books, conferences, training, exhibitions, job boards, market research services, affiliate sales, membership models etc. 

An old colleague of mine at Incisive Media used to refer to ‘the power of seven’ – 7 separate ways in which every page on our websites should interact with the visitor. This is spot on and provides a handy metric for all publishers to think about what their open access editorial is there to achieve. Merely concentrating on eyeballs and CPM rates for advertising is never going to be a solution.

 

A spring clean

When I first set up this blog it was really only meant to be a way of collating my various activities online. Hence the fact that my blogroll only links to me… 

Now, as I have started blogging I realise that this looks incredibly ego-centric. So, over the next couple of weeks I’ll be doing a little spring cleaning and adding a proper blogroll of links to other sites I find interesting. 

Generally, I like to follow blogs and news services about the evolution of media markets – especially b2b – but also in newspapers, search and social media marketing. 

A while ago I posted some links to various sites I enjoyed. Here are a few more:

Reflections of a Newsosaur

Prescott Shibles 

Dan Blank

Bill’s blog

The Obvious

Jon Slattery

Daggle

Min

Editor & Publisher

Sillicon Alley Insider

Let me know if there are any others you think I’ve missed in the comments.

Tim Brooks interviewed at Publishing Expo

A really good video interview with Tim Books of Guardian News and Media.

It’s quite long but well worth watching for Tim’s thoughts on newspapers, magazines and the digital evolution.

Specialist publishers: 3 great conferences coming up in May, June and July.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last 18 months it cannot have escaped your attention that big changes are afoot in the media world. Changes that have been accelerated by the current recession but most of which would have been taking place anyway. Some traditional revenue lines are under significant pressure, business models require reinvention and technological developments are changing the way our customers both consume information and market their products and services.

Against this backdrop should we all put on a tin hat and hide under the nearest desk?

Instead of adopting the Private Frazer approach I strongly suggest that you get out there, meet your peers and learn from others in the industry. On this basis I would like to recommend 3 upcoming events – all of which I have had some involvement in.

The E-Publishing Innovation Forum. Marriott Regents Park, London. 19-20 May.

This 2 day event is organised by my old division of Incisive Media in conjunction with Outsell. Last year it was one of my favourite events of the year and I wrote about some of the presentations I found particularly enlightening. For 2009 Laura and Lorna have again put together a great programme. Featuring speakers including:

• David Craig, Chief Strategy Officer, Thomson Reuters
• Juian Sambles, Head of Audience Development, Telegraph Media Group
• Robert Brown, Media Business Director, Exalead
• Ben Edwards, Exec VP, The Economist Group and Publisher of Economist.com
• Ashley Friedlein, CEO, EConsultancy
• Tim Weller, Group CEO, Incisive Media
• Neil Thackray, Thackray Media
• Nick Barnett, MD, Phorm
• Jonathan MacDonald, Senior Consultant, Mobile Marketing, OgilvyOne
• Graeme McCracken, COO, Reed Business Search
• Dame Wendy Hall, University of Southampton

… and many more influential speakers. Click on the title link above to see the full programme.

33rd Specialized Information Publishers Conference. Mayflower Hotel, Washington D.C. 31st May – June 2nd.

Entitled ‘Deal with the Now. Navigate the Future’ the SIPA Washington Conference looks set to be a cracker. While I have never been to a Washington conference I am the current chair of SIPA UK and sit on the main board of directors. This year I was asked to programme the online marketing track and am very much looking forward to attending. There’s a great line up over the 3 days including keynotes from:

• Jay Berkowitz, CEO of Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing
• Andrew Madden, Director of Strategic Partner Development, Google
• Jeff Pence, Farm Journal Media’s President of its television and newsletter businesses
• Mark Ragan, CEO, Ragan Communications

alongside track presentations from:

• Amy Africa, Eight by Eight
• Matt Bailey, SiteLogic Marketing
• Bill Barnes, Enquiro Search Solutions
• Bob Bly, Bly Copywriting
• Sean Brooks, TechTarget
• Kathlene Collins, Inside Higher Ed
• Nan Dawkins, Serengeti Communications
• Bill Dugan, The Pohly Company
• Sarah Rotman Epps, Forrester Research
• William Fridrich, Wm Fridrich Design
• Herndon Hasty, Range Online Media
• Craig Huey, Creative Direct Marketing Group
• Greg Jarboe, SEO-PR
• Mark Johnson, Copywriter
• Robert Lerose, Lerose Copywriting
• Sandra Niehaus, Closed Loop Marketing
• Don Nicholas, Mequoda Group
• Alan Rosenspan, A.Rosenspan & Associates
• Jim Tucker, Integrating Marketing Technology
• David Yale, Controlbeaters

and many more over the course of the 3 days.

UK Specialised Information Publishers Association Annual Congress. Tower Hotel, London. 7-8 July.

I finish my tenure as chair of SIPA UK at the end of June and am delighted to hand over to Nick Laight of Canonbury Publishing. Nick’s first job will be to chair the SIPA UK Annual Congress and he has already been working hard to put together a great programme.

One of the sessions I am particularly looking forward to attending is a keynote presentation by Bill Bonner of Agora Publications Inc. Bill’s presentation is entitled “A perfect swarm: total integration marketing” and from what I understand it will outline the concept of combining marketing and editorial pieces to come out incredibly fast in response to topical events in the markets publishers serve. The aim is that within 2 hours of a story breaking pieces are published and marketing promotions are in the hands of prospects – both increasing the topicality and response rates of the promotion and ensuring that the publisher receives the full SEO benefits of their efforts. I can’t wait to hear it.

With roundtables, discussion forums, and tracks on marketing, publishing and content the SIPA UK Congress is without doubt my favourite of the year. Full details are on the link above.

If a B2B marketer had launched Wired UK – part 2

OK. Apologies for the delayed sequel – school holidays, planning for a new business, Twittering instead of blogging, blah blah blah…

In my last post I looked at the launch of Wired UK. I said that it was a brave company that would launch a glossy consumer magazine in this climate and that I was generally impressed with the first issue. However, I did feel that the launch team had missed a few tricks.

If Wired UK is to survive better than it did last time then I believe the main thing the team should be concentrating on is building loyal subscribers, capitalising on the buzz of the launch & developing a variety of diverse revenue streams – key B2B disciplines that are sometimes missing in consumer publishing.

All the publicity I have seen since the first issue has been about successful newsstand sales and good initial support from advertisers. Outwardly it seems as though these are the main metrics Condé Nast are monitoring.

Fantastic; but one successful issue doesn’t make a successful business. This is especially true for a bi-monthly* where advertisers and agencies have a long time to forget about you between issues.

As any decent media marketer will tell you, subscriptions rule. Good subscription titles can enjoy 70%+ renewal rates and subscribers pay you the money up front. Subscriptions make a viable long term business and give a great message about circulation and loyalty to advertisers. Without them your business can disappear in a flash.

A quick look at the successful US edition of Wired circulation statements shows that it has nearly 90% of readers on subscription – some 614,000 of them.

The UK market is obviously a lot smaller but it shouldn’t be unrealistic to set a target of 50,000 paid subs by the end of the first 12 months & this would be my prime goal if I was running the launch marketing team. The Independent, in an analysis following the demise of the first attempt at a Wired UK estimated that it would need to sell 80,000 copies an issue to break even. 50,000 subscribers would leave a lot less pressure on the marketing budget for the promotion of newsstand sales.

So, I left my previous post explaining how the pre-launch activity should be concentrating on subscriptions (with a charter offer), data acquisition (via the web site) and social media marketing. I suggested that I would aim to have 12,000 subscribers, 60,000 registered web users and active communities on all the major social media sites 2 weeks before the first edition even hit the newsstands.

What then?

Well, I would also want to make sure that I had more than just a magazine to sell to my prospects. One of the things that’s at the core of successful B2B media is that a thriving media brand should only be the start of your business. The real money often comes from the sales of related products – conferences, training, exhibitions, books, special reports, affiliate deals etc. and the best time to sell them is when interest in your brand is at its highest – when you’re new. So let’s make the most of all these new registered prospects, social media visitors and web site readers & make sure that we have something else to sell.

Let’s also try to covert some of these people who have expressed an interest in Wired into subscribers – not just by inserting flyers in the magazine and directing people through to a subscription bureau but with direct sales contact via e-mail and the phone. As a result of the work we have done pre-launch we can have one to one conversations with a lot of our potential customers. I’d put an offer together – always with a time limit & countdown to encourage urgency – and contact all of my registered readers, fans and followers with a invitation to subscribe.

As well as contacting people on my own databases I would actively be monitoring a range of online channels to see what people were saying about the magazine. I would be seeding influential online personalities with free sample issues and tracking the conversations that are taking place online. By using the advanced function on tools like Twitter search you can get some fairly detailed prospects to call. It would be a shame to leave these people to never get round to subscribing (I haven’t yet, and I’m not hard to find…).

 

*I’ve always been confused about whether that is the right way of describing a publication that comes out once every 2 months.

Update: An interesting interview with Wired’s editor in the ‘back from the dead’ Press Gazette today – £2m first year promotional spend? Crikey.

Postcript (07/05/09) – Just seen issue 2 (June 09) & it’s also good. Also looks like I made a mistake about it being bi-monthly – don’t know where I got that from.

If a B2B marketer had launched Wired UK – part 1

UK edition of Wired launched last week

Last week the UK edition of Wired magazine hit the newsstands for the first time. I have long been a fan of the US version and was interested to see how they had taken the format and adapted it for a UK audience.

Generally I was impressed. It’s a brave company that launches a glossy consumer mag in this environment but the team at Condé Nast have done a pretty good job.

UK Wired kept a lot of things that I liked from the US magazine but toned down the bleeding Sillicon Valley edge – maybe focusing a bit more on design and media instead of gadgets and west coast internet celebrity.

After the launch I was curious about what others were saying about the magazine and so did a quick Twitter search to see feedback from others. Again, it generally seemed to be fairly complimentary and a lot of people were talking about the possibility of subscribing – in fact I was one of them. 

But I haven’t.

Now this doesn’t mean that I won’t. In fact Condé Nast have some pretty attractive subscription options and competitions for new subscribers that I still might take advantage of but the chances of me doing so are getting lower by the day.

You see the main problem that consumer publishers have is that they lose direct contact with their prospects. No matter how good a job the Condé Nast marketers and PR machine have done to get me to buy the first edition they have no idea that I did so and have therefore lost any ability to follow up.

It got me thinking about what I would do differently if launching the magazine. 

My first job would be to build buzz in the run up to the launch. Now this should be fairly easy. There aren’t many high profile magazine launches around at the moment & the topic areas are eminently ‘PRable’. I’m sure Condé Nast have a team of in house and agency PR’s who can do this job in their sleep but I was slightly disappointed in their use of social and online media.

This for example was the magazine’s Twitter feed. It only went live on the day the first edition hit the streets and even now, nearly a week later, there are no real conversations taking place. And where are the Facebook / LinkedIn pages for fans to congregate and show support? – they may be there somewhere but I couldn’t find them and there are no links from the magazine’s webpages.

Now, how about that webpage?  What’s it for? There are some nice articles on there and a video introducing the magazine from the Editor but really; what’s it for?

As I have said already the major disadvantage the consumer publications have is that they lack direct contact with their customers – who generally purchase via a newsagent. The website should be a great way to get round this. It should be used to capture information about customers and prospects and it should offer a chance for dialogue. There is a section that asks you to ‘Join Wired‘ but what is that and why should I?

What I would like to see here is that data capture becomes the primary purpose of the page. With the buzz you can make about the launch I would be disappointed if a decent B2B marketing team couldn’t get tens of thousands of people to register on these pages – what about a free downloadable white paper, a regular weekly e-mail alert or even a free sample of the first issue? There have been lots of great books written about creating effective landing pages, it’s not difficult but is so important.

At the same time a lot of people are already going to be converts. Let’s get their money now & lock them in before launch with a special charter offer for anyone who subscribes by the end of March. The website already pushes subscription options widely but there’s no urgent call to action. When you get through to their subscription landing page it hardly inspires the customer (one of the problems with subscription bureau that try to standardise everything). I bet it has a high bounce rate.

I’ll leave this post here. But let’s assume that it is now 2 weeks before the first edition hits the newsstands. We have 60,000 people registered via our webpages, 12,000 charter subscribers and  active communities on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networks. Now the real fun of launch starts – I’ll come back to it in part 2 (and also let you know if I’ve subscribed yet).

A solution for the broken advertising model in media?

I really enjoyed SIPA’s Online Marketing conference yesterday. We had sessions covering social media, developing online stores, best practice e-mail marketing, monetising online communities, mobile, video & podcasting. Thanks very much to the speakers from Electric Word, AI Digital, E-Consultancy, Nature, Magicalia, Incisive Media, Communicator, Euromoney & Babyworld.

While all the presentations were great the one session which got me thinking most was from Chris Blake, the Chairman of babyworld.co.uk. Chris highlighted some of the history of Babyworld from a launch in 1998 with £750K of seed capital to the sale one year later to Freeserve for £3.7m and the subsequent re-purchase in 2004 for £1. It was a great story.

The site is a direct rival of other parenting publications like Mother & Baby (published by Bauer). Mother & Baby has a circulation of just over 50,000 print copies & 166,000 unique users. By contrast Babyworld is generating nearly 560,000 uniques per month.

While Babyworld is operating like many other specialist media sites – publishing guides, news, reviews & forums for new parents – the really interesting thing that they are doing is operating as a full retail outlet. Not just acting as an affiliate but taking orders, stocking and despatching goods.

From their base in Oxfordshire Chris and his team run a warehouse and shop with stocks of buggies, car seats, clothing etc. They take advertising as well but from the figures shared it looked like they were generating over 70% of their revenue from the direct sale of goods.

Now this is interesting on a load of different levels. It harks back to a previous post I made about the commercial future for newspapers that were successful in driving a lot of traffic but were not able to monetise that traffic effectively. Maybe publishers need to start looking at their business from a very different perspective and, if we believe that the advertising model is broken, consider retail?

SIPA online marketing event tomorrow, 24th March, London

Another quick plug for a great SIPA event in London tomorrow. 

Full programme.

Come along – there are still a few places free.

The greatest week of the year

It’s the Cheltenham Festival this week – the real start of the year. I’ll be there Thursday & Friday if anyone’s around. Can’t wait.

Thomson Reuters results – singing from the same hymn sheet

Another day; another set of results. This time the Q4 results from Thomson Reuters which seem to be pretty robust.

You can listen to Tom Glocer on his investor call here but I wanted to highlight a couple of very similar comments to those heard in the Reed Elsevier call the other day (not direct quotes).

• Thomson Reuters strategy remains to provide must have content and services on a subscription basis
• Information that fits into the workflow of our customers is not a discretionary purchase
• While renewals conversations with financial services customers can be difficult at the moment our sales teams have lots of tools in our toolchest that allow the end users to reduce costs and automate processes allowing lower headcounts in those organisations
• We continue to invest at a time when others are cutting back – the new Westlaw platform is described on the call as a ‘game changer’ for legal information

Worth a listen.

Knowledge driven solutions – the growth sector of business media?

In my last post I had a look at Reed Elsevier’s results presentation and suggested that the real growth area of business media was in building tools and workflow solutions for customers. It is an area that a lot of B2B media companies highlight as part of their strategy and an area that I was working to develop with Incisive Media before I left the company.

Whilst you will hear plenty of senior publishing figures talk about ‘embedding their products in their customer’s workflow’ & ensuring that they are providing resilient ‘must-have’ information; in my experience very few of the people working in business media have much of an idea of what this involves. 

I do not claim to be an expert on the subject but my interest was really piqued at an e-Publishing innovation forum which my division organised in May 2008.

One of our presenters, Josh Bottomley, MD of LexisNexis, explained how his company had evolved from providing information in print; to print and online; to print, online and knowledge driven solutions. Josh showed several examples of how these products were developed and the commercial results in terms of subscription fees which could be charged and renewal rates that were achieved when you get these products right.

One example I remember him using was for the process of residential conveyancing. He showed a flowchart of what was involved for a solicitor undertaking this task on behalf of a client. The flowchart mapped all of the forms that needed completing, in what order and with the relevant points where they had to go outside the firm for relevant bits of information – land registry searches etc. A lot of these tasks were relatively menial but time consuming and each was being carried out in a fairly regimented fashion over and over again. By spending time with solicitors to map this process LexisNexis could start to look at ways in which they could automate and speed up the tasks.

Josh explained that the process was very much an iterative one. Researchers sat with clients to watch and document all the tasks they undertook. These were then presented back to the research participants in a flowchart to check that nothing had been missed. The agreed flowchart was then used as the basis for creating a technology driven solution – ideally embedding some of the proprietary data that LexisNexis already held – that could be presented back to the client on a subscription basis.

The aim was to create a product that sat on the desktop of their community. A product where it was easy to demonstrate the ROI of their spend. A product that their community couldn’t do without – real ‘must-have’ information.

Josh was at pains to point out that just producing a fantastic product didn’t guarantee its implementation. A large part of LexisNexis’ job was to push the concept of behavioural change within the end-user organisations. However, when they worked, these knowledge driven solutions were incredibly successful.

It was interesting that Sir Crispin Davis highlighted this area as a real focus of investment at Reed Elsevier in his results presentation – specifically mentioning a research performance visualiser for academic institutions and a tool for the health service that allowed easy ranking and trend information for the performance of their staff.

I believe knowledge driven solutions may well be a phrase you hear a lot more about once business media companies are able to come up for air. As news distribution, recruitment and advertising models struggle to grow – even in buoyant markets – the search is on for an area of reinvention.

Subscription based workflow products could be the solution.

Listening to the Reed Elsevier results presentation

 

 

Over my years in business publishing I have always loved monitoring the reporting season for publicly quoted media companies. You gain an enormous amount of insight into the broader trends in the industry & it gives a much better perspective into the general market conditions – away from your particular coal face.

Today, one of the largest business media companies – Reed Elsevier – announced its results and Sir Crispin Davis, their outgoing CEO gave his commentary on the numbers. For anyone involved in business media it’s worth a listen.

Reed Elsevier is obviously a robust and well managed company. Their results today, and the reaction of their share price to those results, clearly show that Reed is a lot more resilient to market conditions than other business media organisations.

Why is this? 

Sure, they have scale & a depth of resources but ultimately they are serving many markets that other publishers also try to serve – the legal sector, pharma, insurance etc. It’s just that they are serving these communities in a very different way.

The vast majority of Reed Elsevier’s revenues and profits do not come from a ‘buyer meets seller’ introduction service that a lot of publishers cling to. Instead they are providing valuable data and workflow solutions that help their customers do their jobs better, more efficiently, with more transparency and faster. 

This is the growth sector of business media. This is the reason that Reed Elsevier have been trying to sell RBI. And this is the reason why they have announced today that they are taking £100m of costs out of the RBI business between now and 2011 in further preparation for a sale.

I wouldn’t be surprised if next time the sale comes around Reed Exhibitions aren’t added to the pot.

Surviving and thriving in recession – Feb 24th, London

A quick plug for an event which SIPA are hosting at the end of Feb in London.

There are lots of these type of events around at the moment but this will actively focus on the specialist media community. 

It is designed to be very interactive and limited to 20 participants. Hosted by Robin Crumby of Melcrum Publishing. Details here.

Insource, outsource… automate?

On Tuesday the Business Media blog posted a suggestion that various business media companies should come together to merge their back offices. The writer focused on the 2 Apax backed businesses – Incisive Media and Emap – and suggested that this would be a good way to generate some of the synergies without properly crunching the businesses together (as the original plan had been).

S/he went on to suggest that the combined entity could then invite some of the other key players in the UK business media sector to join them – RBI, Informa & UBM.

Over the course of my career I have been responsible for running a variety of ‘back office’ functions covering customer service, database development, delivery networks, subscriptions and controlled circulation management. I have regularly been involved in debates about whether these functions are better off handled in house or out of house – be it a bureau in Market Harborough or Chennai.

Generally my rule of thumb has been that high value customers (paid subs, conference delegates etc) should remain in house; whilst lower level activity which does not involve a significant payment or complex customer service can be done more efficiently and cheaper out of house. They tend to involve the type of tasks that can be written down in a Service Level Agreement (SLA) & closely monitored.

Thinking about this again today as I read the Business Media post, it struck me that one of the big issues here is not about the economics of insourcing or outsourcing but rather about how hopelessly inefficient most publishing companies still are. In all the organisations I have worked for there are generally a fantastic number of manual processes and workarounds which make up for systems that really aren’t fit for purpose in a digital age. 

Now, I know it is easier said than done to link multiple databases to get a single view of your customers & prospects; or to provide full self service of accounts for those customers via your web sites. I cannot bear to think about the number of hours I have spent on projects like this during my career, but… have a wander out into your accounts, customer service, web teams, database or subscriptions departments today and look at what your staff are doing. Document their work flow.

Tell me you’re not horrified.

There is an old adage that says any task which you have to do more than three times you should look to automate. The way forward for back office savings has to start with automation – whether alone or in partnership with others in the sector.

Short interview

Yesterday I gave a short interview to the team at www.businessmedia.co.uk – you can read it here.

The shift from online to print (no typo)

About 5 years ago I was invited to attend a small roundtable organised by PIRA – a research consultancy. They had been asked by one of their clients (a printer, I think) to gather together a few people from the magazine publishing industry to debate the future of print & give them a steer on where the industry might be headed.

It was an interesting crowd of around a dozen people including Tim Brooks, then of IPC and now the MD of Guardian News Media;  Simon Middelboe, current CEO of Emap Inform; Ian Bissel, then of Emap and now at Reed Exhibitions and Victoria Scott from the Readers Digest.  

The roundtable was supposed to last most of the day but by lunchtime I think there was a general agreement that, in a magazine industry context, print had no real future. We called a halt.

Now I’m not sure how PIRA’s sponsor took this news but I remember an outcry at the PPA (the UK’s trade association for large media companies) when the news filtered back to their various committees. Ian Locks, the Chairman, wrote an indignant leader for Magazine News extolling the virtues of print and the PPA began a research programme to prove the case for print based advertising.

Looking back from January 2009 I was recently revisiting that day.

I have no doubt that most of the participants will view the past 5 years as a validation of our conclusions. A lot of print titles have gone to the wall, valuations for all media businesses are being savaged and magazines are struggling to compete with their online competitors. I am sure that at every ‘old media’ publishing house in the land executives are trying to calculate a tipping point where some aspect of their print publishing no longer makes economic sense & activities should be transitioned to the web – with all of the resulting challenges that this brings.

In fact Steve Rubel even went so far as to profer a date for the end of tangible media in the US; January 2014 – mark it in your Blackberry or iPhone calendar (assuming you no longer use a desk diary).

I too look back over the past 5 years as evidence that print doesn’t work for a lot of the future media models. However, I have seen a couple of examples recently that suggest it still does have a place – especially when it takes advantage of advances in print technology and tailored content.

Citywire is a financial publishing company founded by Lawrence Lever, formerly Financial Editor of the Mail on Sunday. It was launched online in 1999 and covers the fund management, personal finance and financial adviser sectors. The site has grown rapidly, carries a lot of proprietary data and employs many journalists who have passed professional exams and are registered as investment advisers but the FSA. It is 25% owned by Reuters. 

As a ‘web first’ media company Citywire is well placed to avoid the legacy print activities which currently cause so much heartache to old media. And yet, over the years they have chosen to launch magazines alongside their websites. The difference with magazines like New Model Adviser is that they use the huge amount of detail gained from web registration forms to offer personalised content and advertising to their readers. I would imagine that the advertisers see a lot of value in being able to demonstrate individual fund performance to their target audience based on readers preferences, and will pay premium rates to be able to do so.

The same principle of personalised content is being explored by Idiomag – albeit in a digital edition only but it could work in print. Idiomag is a bespoke music magazine that can be individually tailored by users who can import their profiles from services like Last.fm. It  provides an interesting model for publishers who are exploring the ‘pool of content’ approach to publishing where journalists no longer write for a specific title but rather feed all stories into a central CMS with detailed tagging and a taxonomy. Readers then nominate the content which is relevant to them. This can then linked to e-commerce applications for downloads, gig tickets etc.

I am sure there are many other examples of online media ‘reversing’ into print and would welcome links to any good ones in the comments section below.

What next for the B2B media industry?

The other day I pointed to Paul Conley’s post about the demise of the B2B media industry.

At first glance I thought Paul was writing a similar piece to others I have seen in the blogosphere, commentating on the death spiral of a whole industry. An industry that was steadily being disintermediated by the shift to online media. However, after re-reading and spending the time to look through all the related posts and sites that Paul links to I have come away with a different take.

Yes, big media is clearly struggling – and not just because of the economy – but because, in the main, their whole corporate structure is set up for a very different era.

The majority of the big players – in the UK companies like Emap, Incisive Media, United Business Media, Informa, Reed Business Information, Euromoney, Centaur etc. –  are still structured on the basis that they own the main channels of communication between buyer and seller. While there may be a few competing brands within each vertical marketplace, that’s a very powerful position to be in and allows the market leaders to charge customers premium rates for the introductions they can make & information they provide.

Now, in a digital networked world those big media companies have to accept that they no longer have as much power. Information can be communicated via a wide range of new channels. Media owners have to work harder to justify clients spend and the premium they can charge is often reduced.

So, I agree wholeheartedly with Paul’s assessment that the B2B media industry as it stands is in some trouble. Huge rafts of costs will have to be taken out to adapt to a world where media brands have less power. And all this is happening at a time when clients are a lot more demanding; the main players still have to support ailing print operations and high levels of debt force a careful watch on covenant levels.

This is where there is a very real danger of some well established & venerable brands going into a death spiral as they are cut to the bone or of whole companies potentially being broken up.

On the other side of the coin Paul points to a lot of web-only startup media companies. He says that while these companies understand digital publishing and search engine optimisation very few of them really understand what it takes to create a world class, multi-platform media brand. They rely on getting a lot of visitors through the door but, as I wrote in my previous post on the newspaper industry, they then cannot necessarily work out how to make money from this transient and promiscuous audience. Again I agree. So, is there a third way?

Paul’s post looks to the future. He gives his thoughts on the rebirth of the industry. He highlights a new era of successful business media companies as the old guard struggles and looks for a reinvention of the model. All good stuff which highlights the current opportunities for entrepreneurs in this space.

Paul asks what others see for the future of our industry. Here are my quick thoughts:

1. Niche is the word. A lot of the successful media brands of the past 100 years have started off as niche vertical properties which really speak to the daily needs of their audiences. Over time as their industries have expanded these titles have become horizontals and have lost that cutting edge and relevance to their readers.
2. Media brands have to truly embrace community and offer a focal point for interested parties to gather, communicate, purchase, learn and share. This doesn’t mean adding a forum or social network to the side of an existing brand but rather re-engineering so that news distribution is no longer your central function.
3. Building tools, widgets, data and workflow products into your offering is key & adds value and relevance to your brand.
4. Provide a lot of value for free. I believe that the freemium model will really come to the fore but only for media owners who understand a multi-platform and digitally networked world.

The B2B media industry as we know it is about to collapse

So says Paul Conley – read his post

Update: Paul’s post is obviously disturbing for someone who has spent his whole career in this sector. However, I believe he echos some of my thoughts on the disruption of the business media industry and the opportunities that might create. I’m thinking about it and will aim to give my response here shortly.

The value of website traffic?

A couple of weeks ago I hosted a SIPA seminar about search (both search engine marketing and using search to create media products). It was really good.

One of the speakers was Julian Sambles, Head of Audience Development at the Telegraph Media Group. Julian gave an overview of what was happening at the Telegraph since the introduction of the audience development team – a team which focused on pushing content out to readers via search engine marketing and interaction with social media. He claimed that since the introduction of this strategy in the summer of 2007 global unique users of the Telegraph’s websites had risen by over 300% in a 14 month period. You may have seen some of the resulting fallout after claims that the Telegraph had overtaken the Guardian in ABC results.

Now, whether the Guardian, Telegraph or Times has the highest online readership is neither here nor there. Sure, it confers some bragging rights for the leader but what commercial advantage does it give? Anyone with experience of search & social media knows techniques for generating traffic – especially if you work for an authority site like the Daily Telegraph. Just take a look at Google Trends information for news, write loads of ‘linkbait’ top 10 list type stories for social media sites or even pay for a wide range of keywords & you can see your traffic soar. But what use are all these extra eyeballs? They mean nothing unless you can monetise this traffic – and hopefully at the sort of premium rates you were able to justify in print.

The reality, however is that CPM rates continue to fall & newspaper groups continue to lay off staff. So where’s the payback? 

I would argue that the newspaper groups need to learn some lessons from their B2B cousins. And quickly. They need to capture information about these extra readers and make sure they embrace a multi-platform media environment where advertising becomes a smaller part of their revenue mix.

Where, for example are the Telegraph’s conferences and training courses, shops, sponsored sections, affiliate programmes, books and paid reports, exhibitions etc. etc.? They may be there somewhere on the site but as a newly attracted reader I can’t see them. 

Traffic and customers are all well and good but until you have some way of making money from them it means nothing.