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By admin, January 31, 2010 12:16 pm

Perhaps this first post should be titled “The Future of Professional Media” because we are not sure there is a real distinction between the challenges faced by traditional publishers and the broader category of traditional media.  If you are in broadcast or publishing you are probably looking to monetize content across channels and you are likely facing the same challenges.  Likewise, you probably enjoy similar, often hidden, advantages.  We hope we can help you build a winning strategy, demystify the technology and bring focus to your digital channel efforts.

At the end of the day – and there is a lot to talk about and consider in building your own digital channel strategy – it comes down to how well you curate great stories that inform or entertain – or both.  Traditional media companies have been experts at this in print and on-air for many decades.  This capability needs to be exploited in digital channels.   You probably already know that you can’t think about content the same way you think about it in print or on-air.  Unfortunately your strategies to respond are probably foiled by the panic that goes with eroding audiences, shifts in advertiser spending and technology that isn’t really helping.

At storycurator.com, we see the threats to traditional media posed by developments in the digital space – but we are pulling hard for traditional media.  We aren’t journalists or media producers, but we work closely with them.  We don’t have a product (yet), but we understand the technology they use now, and the technology they need to adopt to compete for audience and revenue on the web.

We hope that professional media organizations enjoy a prosperous future and that they can continue to bring credible lifestyle advice, thoughtful entertainment, and, most importantly, responsible, properly funded journalism through digital channels.

We think media companies need to pay attention to a number of challenges posed by emerging technologies and the companies that wield them.  To boil it down, the challenges can be summarized as:

The Driving Forces We Can’t Change

• changes in patterns of media consumption,
• ease of entry for upstarts,
• dominance of web search engine(s)
• ubiquity of social media touchpoints

The first two challenges are going to be hard to fight.  The good news is that the technologies that are driving new consumption patterns and ease of entry for competitors can be leveraged to equal (or better) effect by traditional media.  More on that later.

Search engines (read: Google) and social media, on the other hand, need to be embraced in a different way.  Traditional media needs to find a way to draft in behind what the leading search engines and social media players are doing.   Web search and social media will remain the dominant entry points to the web.  Portals, in our opinion, are playing a declining role as a meaningful entry point but, like any professional publishing organization – they can recover.  Developments like hyper-local applications may emerge as significant new entry points, but they have a long way to go before they become a driving force that ought to affect your strategy.

A user’s entry point to the web is critical and media companies need to care about them.  In our experience, most don’t think much about the user’s end-to-end experience.  More on this in a later post.

The purpose of this blog – and storycurator.com in general – is to pass along all of the things we are learning about how traditional media needs to shift their perspective – and their tool sets – to compete in the digital world.

Discussions on the future of publishing and traditional media are certainly not new topics. They are well covered on many sites. We feel storycurator.com brings a unique perspective by boiling it down to the four driving forces of change, the hidden advantages enjoyed by traditional media organizations and the technologies and tools that will help exploit those advantages.

Media’s (Usually Hidden) Advantages

• your sales force
• your skills in story-telling and curating content for topic exploration

We believe that curating great stories across channels is at the core of any media company’s future success.  Google is an algorithm – they will never be good at story curation that drives engaging forms of topic exploration for their users.  While storycurator.com only has the means to produce content across one channel – the web – we will strive to be the best curators around this topic that we can be.  We hope you can help.  Please provide your thoughts and links to other related resources.

We hope that professional media organizations enjoy a prosperous future and that they can continue to bring credible lifestyle advice, thoughtful entertainment, and, most importantly, responsible, properly funded journalism through digital channels.

A final note: while we celebrate the power of the web to put publishing tools in the hands of all people, we worry about the effects of fragmenting audiences and its impact on the viability of news organizations.  We firmly believe that profitable and independent news organizations need to exist to organize, direct and fund the activities of professional journalists.  Democracy and freedom of informed choice depends on it.  While storycurator.com does not presume to comment on this fundamental concern – we believe it is a concern and we hope you do too.

Comments (1)

By admin, February 4, 2010 7:10 pm

These guys get it.  They really, really get it.  Sure, its boring stuff that they cover on eHow.com and the rest of their properties, but the content seems highly monetizable to us.   I recall talking to publishers about this kind of low-end content two and a half years ago.  The appeal at the time (and to this day) is that the content is highly findable, routinely searched and it provides a very nice context for advertisers or sponsors.  An article on "how to de-ice your sidewalk" is read by folks who are likely to be motivated buyers of de-icing products who have implicitly targeted themselves pretty directly.  At the time, these publishers were horrified at the prospect of producing this kind of content.  Last year, when I introduced the same idea, they were certainly more receptive.  We are now working with a few publishers who want to move this forward in specific content verticals.

Traditional publishers are going to lose a significant share of ad revenue to Demand Media and the like

At storycurator.com, our intention is to bring the Demand Media story to as many media companies as we can – if only to get their reaction and feedback.  My sense is that there will be resistance to the idea of mimicking this approach, which is unfortunate.  With their established sales forces and their relationships with advertisers and agencies, media companies have a current advantage and a window of time to make this model or something similar work.

If a media company tells us that they aren’t in the business of writing this kind of content, then we will be obliged to suggest that Demand and those like them will be taking ad dollars right out of their pockets.  This will happen for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the likely performance of campaigns embedded in this highly relevant content.

We wouldn’t necessarily suggest that recognized media brands sully themselves by focusing exclusively in simple, service media – but we recommend some move towards the tools and approach used by Demand for editorial planning.

Demand Media-style content provides a better context for advertisers than traditional publishers’ editorial choices allow

It is also worth noting that the traditional media companies operating today were the only game in town ten or even five years ago.  Broadcast and publishing, as mediums, were too expensive to produce stories on "how to de-ice your sidewalk".  The web makes content so easy and cheap to produce – and so findable – that the kind of content that media companies have historically produced, because consumers demanded it, is now, potentially, not the best content for advertisers.  Demand is showing us how a whole new category of content is going to sneak up and take advertising dollars from traditional media because, frankly, it is content that sells snow-blowers and de-icing agents while traditional editorial content, entertainment and news does not.   Oh, and by the way, we don’t think social media sells this stuff either.  More on that in another post.

When contextually targeted ads can outperform media buys for reach by 400%, advertisers will notice

Sure, I hear you saying that media companies still have reach, and reach matters.  Granted, but we see reach in the traditional sense declining in importance.  Perhaps reach across an aggregation of properties via an ad network will still matter, but even that is a point for future debate.

Have a read of this Wired Magazine article to get a full sense of what Demand is really all about.  I’m not sure about Demand’s focus on video.  That seems strange to me, but their algorithms for targeting findable, highly sought after easily monetizable content is groundbreaking and gamechanging:

Demand Media | Magazine.

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By admin, January 31, 2010 2:11 pm

Curating for Topic Exploitation

Google and other search engines, including emerging semantic search, do topic exploitation very well.  You give the search engine a topic keyword or phrase, and it will do its best to show you relevant articles for that match the topic.  For curators, exploiting a topic according to a keyword is important, but Google will always do it better.  We think good curation considers exploitation, but techniques for enabling exploration are more important.

Curating for Topic Exploration

A great curator has a sense of how a topic ought to be explored.  That is the art in the science of publishing to the digital channel.  Google will never do this very well.  Exploration can branch in many directions, depending on the user, and providing useful paths for exploration is not easy but, if done well, your users won’t go back to Google right away and your all important engagement metrics will improve dramatically.  Advertisers and sponsors will learn to appreciate topic engagement because (and depending on the topic) it provides a great context for promoting brands, products and everything else that advertisers care about.  Ironically, the best example of curating for exploration is Wikipedia – a web property that can’t even be monetized.