You can hear a lot of voices talking about the architecture of participation, the information overload, the amateurization of the masses, the strategical value of user generated content, the long tail model.

Ok, but who is doing money leveraging these ideas? How traditional media companies are charging their business models as a response of the web 2.0 revolution?

David Hornik of the VentureBlog provides great points on that in his Where’s The Money In The Long Tail?.

To freely quote:

I have come to the conclusion that there are essentially two general classes of technology the will benefit economically from the Long Tail — aggregators and filterers.

The aggregators are those web businesses that seek to collect up as much of the Long Tail content as is possible, so as to make their “stores” a one stop shop for content no matter how popular or obscure….The value to consumers from these content aggregators is that they need not shop in dozens of places on the web in order to acquire a diverse set of content. As a result, aggregators are able to extract a disproportionate amount of value for the sale of each individual piece of content.

The filterers are those businesses that make it easier to find the content in which we are interested, despite the increasing proliferation of content creators, hosts, aggregators, etc. The purest form of filterer is the search engine. But the more obscure the content, the less effective the generalized search engine will be.

As an aside, I believe that it is difficult to be an aggregator without also being a filterer. It will be hard to sustain the scale necessary for an aggregation business if you don’t initially also provide some of your own filtering tools… to help consumers fully appreciate and navigate the breadth of the content they have to offer.

A similar conclusion is posted by Charlene Li (Forrester) in her The changing media business model talking about a panel on the impact of Technology on the content business at the Software & Informatioun Industry Association Content Forum:

Media companies in the past derived their value from either: 1) their distribution channel; or 2) the content they created……

I believe that in the future media companies will generate the bulk of their value from serving their ability to aggregate and serve audiences better than the competition. It doesn’t matter if the media company actually creates or even controls the content that draws them. Channels will be transparent and content won’t necessarily even be owned in a syndicated and aggregated content landscape…..

If you take the social computing view that as a publisher, you can’t serve ALL of the needs of your customer yourself, then the best that you should do is to be the FIRST source of information for your audience…

Also Matt MacAlister wrote about this epocal shift in his piece Media needs to reflect attention, not collect attention:

One of the important lessons…..is for media companies to think of themselves more like a mirror. If online media brands can successfully help their customers to get attention then they will win.

…..It means that you need to stop pushing content out and start introducing your online audience to each other.

After reading things like this I start wondering whether publishers should stop creating content completely. The efficiencies of leveraging an online media brand merely as a way to conduct 1-1, 1-many, and many-many conversations only amongst the audience itself seem intuitively more powerful and future-proof than almost any form of broadcasting we have today.

…This model suggests that media brands don’t have anyone listening to them. The sites’ “usersâ€? or “visitorsâ€? are interacting with each other instead…competing for attention amongst each other.

So my final take on this is that actually the goal is giving the right content (even if aggregating it) to the right people (the biggest and most motivated target group possible) in innovative ways (basically leveraging emerging collaboration 2.0 ideas).

This is a big shift for traditional media and publishing companies.

In the same category:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 14th, 2006 at 11:12 am and is filed under General Discussions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.