Aug
25
That Ghost in the Machine
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, privacy, Publishing, Search, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
There has to be a better way. Seven times have I raced to the telephone today, and seven times have I been greeted with “(pause ..click.) Here is an important message about your insurance/ mis-sold PPI/ tax filing etc etc”. I have put my name on every register but still the intrusive rubbish pours in. My mail box is full of it, and the kindly folk who send us magazines pack a few between every page as well as on them. This dandruff of sales offers is perfectly understandable and indeed some of my best friends, the nicest people you can imagine, make a living out of creating space – filling promotional gunk. And, even worse, many of my clients depend for a revenue stream on selling that space. But I cannot be the only person on the planet who feels exhausted by fending off the intrusive presence of advertising, and feels like saying “When I’m ready to buy, I will give a signal!”
Yesterday I read a fine and stimulating article in the Observor by John Naughton (http://gu.com/p/4by3j), a commentator I much admire and who I have often quoted here. He entitled it: “Is this really the beginning of the end for web ads?” And he cited his use of the Ghostery app to measure the numbers of services watching him using the web in order to find out what he was doing in order to serve him an ad. He counted 31 trackers, and he also quotes a Mozilla engineer as looking at a page served by a well known tech site and finding that the “content” comprised 8k of storage and the ads 6 mb. And we wonder why, in bandwidth starved, fibre-scarce, pseudo-broadband Britain, pages take so long to load! And by now you will be ahead of me, I suspect. Put together the trackers and their bandwidth use, and the ads and theirs, and any school child with a smartphone who wants to get a decent upload time ( – to quote Naughton, we are talking about loading a page to an iPhone in 2 seconds as against eleven at present – ) will load ad-blocking software. Apple, who have no skin in this game, have revised IoS9 and the iPhone release due in the autumn with heavyweight content blocking facilities. They will not be universally effective but think of this: online has the greatest potential for advertising of any medium we have yet acquired for communication purposes. You can track an ad, fit it precisely to your customer’s behaviour, adjust it so readers react to it – and yet advertising in the network has never commanded the rates that it did in the pre-digital world.
So let’s follow the Naughton thesis a little further. Imagine the revolts gain strength. Resentment at the intrusiveness and cost of receiving all those online ads turns into a global movement that blocks them out. Network speeds improve and user costs go down, but that part of publishing that still depends on advertising for a revenue stream takes a further big hit. This will be offset to an extent by Buy Buttons in apps and by brand sponsorship to promote them.
But in a world where users demand free information – and can get it – subscription is not the complete answer in filling the consequent revenue deficit. And providing services, in which information is a part of the deal, is certainly a part of the solution, but how many service vendors do we need? Recent evidence seems to show that users value a dominant incumbent, a challenger and an innovative newcomer – but not much else.
We shall certainly have sponsorship, and that may be a growth point. And it is not hard to imagine the rapid growth of brokerage businesses designed to introduce buyer and seller. I know many in the software sales area, and they infest travel markets. As a general rule the B2B brokers tend to build brand by word of mouth while their consumer equivalents are big brand advertisers – and may be the big brand sponsors of the future. In a world where you buy your Olympic Games coverage from Amazon, watching the Expedia 100m final may make a lot of sense. And Expedia advertising online may not.
This year has seen another new flood of Internet service start-ups. I think we now have to look very carefully at the funding of advertising dependent services in the years to come, and ask where the revenue streams come from in a world where the advertising balloon is deflating. The next DotCom Bust, and we can be sure there will be one, will have The Decline of Advertising running through it like Brighton Rock.
Jun
30
When Culture eats Strategy…
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
The wise man at the head of the table in a meeting last week reminded me of this old saw. And quite rightly we were discussing academic publishing at the time. And the words came back to me when I saw last week that Springer had acquired the Max Planck Living Review journals and that Maney, with its considerable position in the important Materials Science sector, had sold out to Taylor and Francis. The pressure to consolidate drives both these deals. Both of these large acquirers can use their scale in terms of production and distribution to improve margins here, and manifestly there are not that many interesting acquisition opportunities around. Yet both of these deals display very different characteristics. In my view, it is hugely encouraging to see Taylor and Francis, enjoying the confidence of their new management at the Informa level, investing again in content that they have probably been eyeing for a decade. Cash cows need to be fed and watered like other assets. Yet the age of the quick add-on acquisition are drawing to a close. The major players must look to organic growth, to developing the service cultures that will give them prime sectoral positions with researchers, rather than seeking ever greater volume to thrust into diminishing library budgets.
Viewed from this angle, the Springer deal is the more innovative. Maney was descended from a printer who had moved logically into intellectual property ownership. Living Reviews is based on a research institute making the same move. But there the similarities end, because Living Reviews signals yet another move away from the traditional formats of publishing. The whole idea of having a review article which can be perpetually update and change to reflect changing trends, and always be up to date when you view it, represents a data challenge and an editorial challenge. For Springer to even think of it demands a data environment that allows for rapid new development – an agile publishing environment. The major step taken by Springer to revitalize SpringerLink by recreating it on a MarkLogic platform, is critical to the organic growth strategy because it allows all of the data to be available all of the time for new product development.
We do not know yet whether the Max Planck philosophy of continually evolving review articles will succeed in other disciplines outside of physics, but if it does it will provide a dynamic growth point, and one capable of very high impact factors as theses present “living” reviews have demonstrated in their 15 year history. But what does this imply for the researcher/author – publisher relationship? And what for the idea of the Article and the Journal? In a discussion recently I was very struck by my interlocutor referring to the “Plos 1 journal”. In any sensible world we would by now have cast out the word “journal” and referred to Plos 1 as a database. The only likeness shared by these data elements is that they passed a test of competence in scientific method and procedure. Not only are they not a journal but very many of our never-printed, never-shelved so-called journals should not be referred to using that term. And when, almost two decades ago, I wrote that the Article and not the journal was the true unit of currency in scholarly communication, I was trying to express then the need to re-invent as we move away from any sense of being rooted in a prior print world. So Living Review articles are not articles as print would know them, bounded by time. They are articles as Wikipedia would know them, and we cannot afford to let our old print culture devour our new researcher-facing strategies. But the small sample of interested parties I spoke to last week were less impressed that the Springer acquisition is Open Access and much more interested in talking about speed of update and publication. Funny, that, after all the outrage of the 1990s at slothful publishing producing the goods too slowly, publishing is now much quicker – but, in a network age, still too slow.
So to me the lesson is clear. When we get into the room we use to plan the future, we need to leave the heritage terminology outside of the door. Lets concentrate on researchers and their workflow, and then on how we can improve performance. Mendeley and ReadCube (which notched up another useful win last week) have probably done more in the past five years to make the world of science findable and manageable than anything else. If the future lies in self-publishing with institutional repositories then where is your figshare? Or its successor? The future is not a game that everyone can play, and being Big, while it helps, is not the decisive advantage that it once was. You do really need to have the right culture in order to get into the strategy room in the right frame of mind, and get out with the two vital components – a component of tomorrow and a glimpse of the horizon.
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