Mar
23
The Odd Future of Aggregation
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Workflow | 1 Comment
Mr Bezos and his cohorts at WaPo (the Washington Post to you and I, earthlings) have decided, we are told, on an aggregation model. As far as skilled translators of Bezos-speak can tell, this will mean bringing together licensed news content from all over the globe – spicy bits of the Guardian, a thin but meaty slice of the London Times, a translated and processed sausage segment of FAZ, a little sauerkraut from Bild, a fricasse of Le Monde… well, you get the picture, and the fact that I am writing this before dinner. These ingredients will get poured into a WaPo membership pot, heated and served to members who want to feel that they are on top of global goings-on, from the horses mouth, and without having to read the endless recyclings and repetitions which characterize the world media at source.
Well, I see the point, and the idea of membership and participation seems to me one which has endless energy these days. But I have been thinking for several years now that the Aggregation business model as experienced from 1993 onwards on the Web is on its last legs. Believing that “curation” is too often a word which we use when we are trying to maintain or defend a job, I have tried to steer clear of imagining that storage, the ultimate network commodity, was a good place to start building a business. In the early days of the Web it was certainly different. Then we could create the whole idea of the “one stop shop” as a way of simplifying access and reducing friction for users. All of the things we were collecting and storing, for the purposes of aggregation, were in fact “documents”, and their owners wanted them to be stored and owned as documents, bought as documents and downloaded as documents. The early reluctance of STM publishers to apply DOI identity beyond the article level and make citations, or references or other document sub-divisions separately searchable seems in retrospect to demonstrate the willingness of IP owners to manipulate the access to protect the business model.
Three clear developments have comprehensively undermined the utility of content aggregation:
* the desire of users to move seamlessly from one part of one document through a link to another part of a different document seems to them a natural expression of their existence as Web users – and in the content industries we encouraged this belief.
* the availability of search tools in the Web which permit this self-expression simply raises the frustration level when content is locked away behind subscription walls, and increases the likelihood that such content will be outed to the Open web.
* the increasing use of semantic analysis and the huge extension of connectivity and discoverability which it suggests makes the idea that we need to collect all or sufficient content into a storehouse and define it as a utility for users just by the act of inclusion a very outdated notion indeed.
It seems to me that for the past decade the owners of major service centres in the aggregation game – think Nexis, or Factiva, or Gale or ProQuest – have all at various times felt a shiver of apprehension about where all of this is going, but with sufficient institutional customers thinking that it is easier to renew than rethink, the whole aggregation game has gone gently onwards, not growing very much, but not declining either. And while this marriage of convenience between vendors and payers gives stability, end users are getting frustrated by a bounded Web world which increasingly does not do what it says on the tin. And since the Web is not the only network service game in town, innovators look at what they might do elsewhere on internet infrastructure.
So, if content aggregation seems old-fashioned, will it be superseded by service aggregation, creating cloud-based communities of shared interests and shared/rented software toolsets? In one sense we see these in the Cloud already, as groups within Salesforce for example, begin to move from a tool-using environment to user-generated content and more recently the licensing of third party content. This is not simply, though, a new aggregation point, since the content externally acquired is now framed and referenced by the context in which users have used and commented upon it. Indeed, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, all of the great Aggregators mentioned above have sought to add tools to their armoury of services, but usually find that this is the wrong way round – the software must first enhance the end user performance, then lend itself to community exploitation – and then you add the rich beef stock of content. For me, Yahoo were the guys who got it right this week when they bought Vizify (www.vizify.com), a new way of visualizing data derived from social media. This expresses where we are far more accurately than the lauded success of Piano Media (www.pianomedia.com). I am all for software companies emerging as sector specialists from Slovakia onto a world stage, but the fact that there is a whole industry, exemplified by Newsweek’s adoption of Piano this week, concerned with building higher and harder paywalls instead of climbing up the service ladder to higher value seems to me faintly depressing.
And, of course, Mr Bezos may be right. He has a good track record in this regard. And I am told that there is great VC interest in “new” news: Buzzfeed $46m; Vox $80 m; Business Insider $30m, including a further $12m last week: Upworthy $12 m. Yet I still think that the future is distributed, that the collection aggregation has a sell-by date, and that the WaPo membership could be the membership that enables me to discover the opinions of the world rather than the news through a smartly specialized search tool that exposed editorial opinion and thinking – and saved us from the drug of our times – yet more syndicated news!
Jan
19
There is nothing on TV…
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
“Well” she said “there is nothing on the television. I don’t know why we have one, since its certainly not for what we watch. Well, my husband watches the cricket, of course. He’s cricket crazy, up half the night watching the Ashes from Australia, he was. And I like Crime. Of course, it only takes me 10 minutes to find out who the killer is, and you’ve got to watch all those ads before you can see you were right, so I mostly record them and take out the ads as I watch them…”
This extract from a 2013 survey (this family watched 45 hours of television a week) demonstrates once again that television remains the dominant source of entertainment in many developed societies, even if we do not switch on at 6pm and close with the National Anthem when broadcasting stopped, as British social critics of the 1970s feared we would. Barry Parr, now Outsell’s lead analyst in the sector has started to examine what is happening with a series of very well-argued articles (“TV’s complexity crisis is an opportunity for content owners” 13 January 2014 www.outsellinc.com). He set me thinking about what content owners in the print industry did a decade ago when they went through the parallel process – the traditional delivery format is broken and the traditional delivery mechanisms, with all of their complex supply chain relationships, are beginning to fail. Do the reactions of the print world and the record industry give a clue to the likely reactions of their television peers?
A first reaction in print was disbelief, followed swiftly by denial that the speed or range of change could be anywhere near as severe as commentators reported. So as book publishers were saying that “they will always want narrative and always in book form” so cable operators and channel owners in television are talking about brand loyalty, the high value attached to scheduling, and the importance of holding the line on pricing and packaging. And just as brand does not attach to publishers in entertainment markets but to authors, so brand does not attach to channels but to programming/shows. So as a result both types of middleman – publishers and channel operators – misjudged their users, as almost all intermediaries did in the analogue world, because it was impossible for them to see how content was consumed, and their knowledge of their audiences , despite all the surveys, the focus groups and the market research, was stale by the time it reached them. Only in a digitally networked world do you begin to overcome the problems of knowing audiences, and even then, asking them questions is less informative than watching their behaviour and mapping their reactions (recommendations etc).
Shortly we shall see television distribution, which five years ago in Europe was diminishing its creative efforts and outsourcing everything, beginning to buy back the outsourcers and talk about the value of “content”, as in “content will always be king” (book publishing c.1995). This will be followed by a great wailing and gnashing of teeth around further falls in channel advertising revenues, while every effort is made to seek alternative revenue sources. I quoted Jim Dolan, chairman of Cablevision, last year, when he pointed out that his many children of all ages, now used Netflix on Cablevision. He saw this as a signal to work on Cloud libraries and the ability in the network to download and store up to 10 programmes simultaneously. And surely this is a very proper reaction, but only if the cable players really see their future as utilities, with very well-regulated margins, competitive pressure from telcos in a similar bind and subject to fickle consumers who can change broadband suppliers on a click. So here is the second thing which television will find hard to buy: digitally networked markets increase consumer power immensely, and the contractual tie-in so beloved of cable and satellite is now a very shaky foundation indeed. Alongside Netflix, who can fail to see Google and Amazon as major market players here – and they really do understand about Cloud libraries and downloads.
If Jim Dolan really thinks that the US cable industry is “living in a bubble with its focus on TV packages that people must pay for as offered” (www.hollywoodreporter.com/print/599574) then there is at least a hope that a note of realism may be afoot which was absent in print and music. Yet TV has always been about mass audience and numbers of eyeballs sold to the advertiser. Can it work on a niche interest, subscription model? Spending time last year with Fred Perkins, a survivor of print (ex FT.com, ex McGraw-Hill) at Information Television (http://www.information.tv/?cid=3) in London I saw convincing demonstrations (caravanning and mobile holiday homes formed a classic model for this) which made me wonder why more niches, alongside other B2B or B2C digital content vehicles, do not use niche TV effectively. OK, I know that many magazine publishers invested in studios in the hope of getting into an aligned television market, and this never worked. But that was before the digital broadband network had further blurred and softened the edges between content formats and packages. My conversations with Fred, and stories like the BBC News item (www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25457001) last week which profiled, in describing the prospects for internet television broadcasting, NTVE (Nautical TV Europe) based in Magaluf, Mallorca, and financed not by advertising but by sponsorship and product placement. But its distribution model is, well, fairly cheap… or free, if you don’t find that four letter word offensive.
So this may not be an option for Mr Murdoch, who was rather hoping that the satellite/pay TV model would continue to fund him through the next three decades. The signs at the moment are that, under the same digital network stress as print and music, TV programme distribution will change radically to a My network model, still paid by subscription but no longer powerful as an advertising medium. And beyond that? Maybe the subscription will be to a programme guide that enables you to decide what you watch, when and where and in what sort of device, with monthly billing depending on the choices made, the storage used in the Cloud and the deals that you make with programme makers? It is Your Choice!
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