Content Partnership Strategies for Australian Media Organisations

Sydney.
We're getting close to the end of this first day at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress; one more speaker and a panel to go. We begin with a repeat performance by Tony McGinn, CEO of MCM Entertainment, who was already on a panel this morning; he opens by noting that we are in a period of significant change, even without the added impact of the global financial crisis. The first fully educated Internet generation is about to take the wheel, and will drive radical change over the next few years.

Because of the fragmentation of the Web, we have seen the emergence of sales networks which bundle advertising on a range of sites; outside of direct marketing on proprietors' own sites, these remnant sales networks have decimated the value proposition in online marketing, selling CPMs (cost per thousand page impressions) in the low single digit dollars. Especially in an environment where every marketing dollar spent is already being questioned, this significantly threatens the profitability of the online advertising industry. (The industry workers behind this work in highly unstable, transitory jobs, and don't do it for the money or job security, but instead to break new ground. These are people who have grown up on the Web; they're now beginning to run the Web.)

Tony suggests that in the future, media capabilities will totally change, and/or content will become irrelevant. Cost of entry to the marketplace will diminish even further, and much content will be wanted in new formats yet to emerge, not in the formats in which it currently exists - everything is ephemeral. The Internet we have built is the world's biggest machine, and we're only beginning to scratch the surface; this machine currently uses 5% of the world's power, and never fails (at least, never in its entirety) - it is becoming the world's brain.

The concept of portals is outdated, and the portal as we know it today will disappear quickly, Tony says. The Web is evolving from an information retrieval engine to a system which anticipates our intent and completes tasks for us. Net natives know how to make this system work for them; the portal, however, is built on older and by now outdated understandings of media. (Tony shows a graph of Internet evolution from Minding the Planet, which shows how far we've come and what's likely to be ahead.)

Part of this is driven by the emerging Semantic Web, which builds on the Resource Description Framework to consistently describe Web resources and thus enables Web devices to exchange information about data amongst themselves. Together, they are therefore able to do more and more work for us - aggregating available information that is customised to our personal usage profiles, or in other words, transforming information from 'their view' (the generic view of media companies) to 'my view' (tailored to my specific interests).

Content must therefore be made accessible by media organisations to users in multiple formats, and readied for the many Semantic Web robots which will access it. It must be opened up for use, not protected behind firewalls, trusting that quality content will always flow to the top, and in order to offer quality content, media companies may need to focus on a selection of areas where they have established expertise rather than carrying the losses of those areas where they are not.

Media organisations must be 'best in breed' - number one or two in their market - or otherwise they will lose money; generic media companies may need to divest themselves of lower quality elements, and focus more strongly on being niche players in areas of strength. (MCM, for example, is number one or two in some online music markets - so this is where its focus lies.) It is important to partner with others here - importing content from best in breed partners as well as exporting content where the company is itself best in breed. The comparison here is Coke - MCM wants vending machines in as many places as it can, but it's not waiting for partners to come to it; it aggressively pursues them in order to place its online music 'vending machines' in as many spaces as possible (for example in the music section at news.com.au).

The most simple, fair, and effective approach here is the old business priciple of win/win, but in the present environment this is not always possible; Australia is a comparatively small market, but competition is nonetheless very strong. Apple's iTunes and Google's interface are great inspirations for how to keep things simple and thereby attract large numbers of users.

Overall, content providers need to understand what their market is, and establish where they are best in breed (and where they aren't, work out who is and what partnerships are possible with them). Content must be exported to maximise exposure, and metadata is crucial here. Users have a need for more signal, less noise - and the Semantic Web can help to deliver this.

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