It’s definitely a topic you hear a lot about, but what does it actually mean? Years ago it consisted of custom publishing and customer magazines, but it’s taken on a whole new importance on digital channels.

Content builds relationships between publisher and reader. It fills an informational or entertainment need. And as a result, encourages more brand interactions. It is a social object; it gets shared quickly and easily if it is good. And increasingly, the interaction with content can be measured (influence, popularity etc) and linked to direct commercial advantage.

A content marketing definition

The creation and distribution of relevant and valuable content to attract and engage a defined target audience – with a clear commercial objective.

To elaborate on this, there are a few ‘pillars’ of content marketing worth bullet pointing: (large hat-tip here to Joe Pulizzi):

• Editorial-based content – must be informative, educational or entertaining.
• Marketing backed – there is an underlying commercial objective for the publisher
• Behaviour-driven – seeks to maintain or alter the reader’s behaviour
• Multi-platform – can be across print, digital, audio, video, events
• Targeted at an audience – if you can’t name the audience, it’s not content marketing

And “content marketing” is being adopted by functions beyond traditional “marketing” as the enterprise organises itself around consumers.

• PRs create content for direct publication in the press, or as corporate communications, but increasingly in the form of blog posts, videos, and tweets.
• SEOs create content to make a brand rank well on search engines.
• Customer support teams create and deliver content to customers to solve needs.
• Marketers create content to position the brand an attract interest customers.
• Salespeople craft persuasive content to overcome sales objections and close.
• Advertisers create content that is impactful and shareable; as earned media rather than just bought media.

It is easy now to hear what people are saying. It’s easy to get directly involves in the conversation with new content, or recommend existing content. And these new platforms are free at the point of use.

So why doesn’t everyone do it?

• “We aren’t publishers!” – but many companies are now hiring editors and content strategists to do this job for them.
• “What happens if we say the wrong thing?” – but with good procedure and people, you will safely present a personality, rather than be left behind preaching to no one.
• “There are no tangible results” – good content marketing is measurable and produces real results. Just ask us.
• “It isn’t worth it” – your competitors are, or soon will be, doing it, and they will become the most visible, trusted and liked voice in your market.

Content Marketing Strategy

Although this clearly depends on the context of your company, idio’s basic content marketing strategy can be used as a framework:

• Connect with people by publishing relevant, quality content
• Build trust where they come back
• Gain insight every time they interact with you to deliver better value
• Become the authority in your market when they rely on you
• Develop a commercially valuable relationship

For more information about blended content marketing (authoring content alongside aggregation and curation of other people’s content), see this post.

For more information and some great experts on this topic, have a look at:

• The Content Marketing Institute
• The Content Marketing Playbook
• Post Advertising (by Story Worldwide)
• Content Marketing Today
• A list of top Content Marketing blogs

The Jargon Buster

In an industry which is littered with Three Letter Acronyms, idio is committed to making things understandable. The Jargon Buster is a series of blog posts that explain, and give context to, a range of industry acronyms and phrases. Please feel free to suggest new submissions.

If you are a brand or media  company wanting to increase the value of your existing and future content assets, and deliver the right content to the right customer at the right time on the right channel, do give us a call. idio delivers strategic technology-driven solutions to organise your content around your customer. We help you solve problems and deliver tangible value. To find out more, see http://idioplatform.com.

As expected, catchphrases seemed to guide the day’s discussions, from the success rate of ‘freemium’ business models, to the benefits of ‘monetizing the audience’. But this wasn’t so much a brainstorming session to figure out an all-encompassing solution to the paywall question; it was a series of panels with recognizable businesses and the compelling case-studies they had to bring to the table. While we won’t go into a break-down of each talk, it was very interesting to find out how companies have been applying different methods in their experiments with paywall or no paywall, and some of them are worth rehashing.

For example, Aftonbladet’s Elsa Falk brought a great case study of how one of Sweden’s largest newspapers has tried to nest itself in both online and print platforms. Although it has maintained a paid-for, albeit non-subscription daily paper that is still its largest means of income, its (mostly) free online ventures have been popular too, with over 5,400,000 visits on the website and 700,000 on mobile. Falk revealed that 70% of Swedish readers are prepared to buy web content, and following up on this Aftonbladet initiated a few requirements to attract more readers and keep old ones, via ‘simple offers, cross-sales, good customer service’ for starters. Cross-sales alone seems to have taken a life of itself, and could be something other companies could emulate more; while some strategies have been unsuccessful, (a ‘micro-payment’ system where individual pieces/articles are bought), it has crossed over into genres like travel and pay-per-view TV documentaries that have proven more popular with subscribers.

On the other hand, the Financial Times are clearly loyal to a no-holds barred subscription model, and have been since 2001, with their latest numbers coming to 206,000 subscriptions by 2011. Not a bad figure, but for a news organisation that has its own team of data analysts, who ‘make propensity models of subscriber trends’, it is necessary to keep growing that number. Still, speaker Mary Beth Christie does have a point that every digital content company will speculate about (and the polar opposite to the work ethic of Aftonbladet): the benefits of specialisation. Sure, this probably won’t apply to every content manufacturer but even for, say, a travel magazine company–offering specialist, processed data could garner more costs but also more faithful subscribers. In FT’s case, their horde of fans can look to them for in-depth news and reports on finance, and, like Christie says, they’re just ‘really good at what they cover’; certainly for any company this would be an ideal trait, paywall or no paywall.

On the other side of the spectrum, we have Conor Dignam, Director of Media and Group Editor at Emap Inform, a specialist company in magazine and online resources. Interestingly, all of Emap’s content was free-to-air, (meaning simply ‘free’) until recently, when the global recession kicked paywalls back online as digital ad revenues didn’t work out as well as hoped, and payments for print versions were trickling out. While it’s impressive that their subscription rate jumped by 25% from an all-round free platform to paywall, the important lesson here is that Emap created multiple advertising placements through Google First Click, registered newsletters, RSS feeds and content rich homepages.

What is clear from these three companies alone is that yes, freebie content will almost always get attention, but despite criticism, paywalls have clearly been implemented and can work.
Dignam’s pyramid had a ‘free’ base, then ‘registration’, (requiring sign-ups), followed by ‘brand subscription’, (indicating greater commitment from a paying user), then the pro-package almighty ‘premium’ apex. This is to exemplify increase in value in that 1) premium products are key to strategy, 2) deeper engagement and higher value spell out actionable content, and 3) data needs to be used in more intelligent ways than before.

Other key points from other speakers include:
-Matt McAlistair, from Guardian Media Group
McAlistair discussed free ad-supported and ‘mutualization’ models, like the ones above, and the concept of utility market creation. How can we measure if things are going well? One way is to see if you are ‘making things quickly and cheaply’. Is it being used by people and shared? Is it being used by people and shared a lot? A great initiative that GMG have undergone is throwing back content to initiate more interaction and user involvement, as they did when they asked Guardian readers to help sift through declassified government spending files. This kind of initiative is key to move from ‘building things’ to ‘empowering people’.

-Paul Lomax, Dennis Publishing, on making advertising work online
While Dennis Publishing sells advertising solutions and affirms that key websites can simultaneously be platforms for advertising and user-friendly, Lomax offered guidance on how exactly to do that, such as offering micro sites with creative solutions, balanced targeting that doesn’t override technical capacities with forecasted expectations, competitive pricing, switching off adverts in traffic where it is unnecessary, and, controversially, to stop competing solely on audience demographics.

-Mike Soutar, Shortlist Media Ltd.
Soutar revealed that amongst all its publications, monthlies mags are a better hit than weeklies, and doesn’t shy away from the fact that theirs is an agency that chases after the young and affluent. His most noteworthy points would have to be affirming something that most people in the industry would hesitate to believe; that the advertising world would not collapse that easily, but an inherent ‘ebb and flow’ exists. Soutar predicts that ‘when times get tough, as they will this year, there will be some advertisers who will step out more boldly than others [in seeking out or creating opportunities]’.

This small breakdown doesn’t speak for all the viewpoints of the day, but it is indicative of the variety of thoughts and strategies that are being put into place all over the digital content landscape. As someone at the conference said, quite fittingly, ‘it is all part of a journey, a long travel’.

Case in point: on the list of content formats for which people do pay are iPhone apps. The success of these apps have clearly not gone unnoticed by businesses, who hustle to the Apple platform to create a direct bridge between the consumer and their product/content/information or whatever they’re peddling. There’s also the concept of the ‘new content experience’, referring to anything from recommended stories to self-bookmarks of content you like. Again, providers of access points will have to prove more versatile as they cater to a (paying) audience that not only wants more content, more quickly, but also wants more ‘self-service’ and sharing attributes.

In a debate on whether or not users will pay for content online, Clay Shirky mentions that people will only pay for that which is ‘necessary’, and that most content available isn’t so much ‘necessary’ as ‘optional’. But, a quick scan at the most popular of 60,000+ iPhone apps last year and I find Super Monkey Ball; hardly an app one might consider critical content. And yet, you’ll find many consumers drawing the line when newspapers announce their conversion to say, a non-free iPad app version.

In that case, maybe it’s not only about access point. Clearly, the consumer dynamic has changed enough with these platforms to reveal that access points won’t necessarily guarantee paying customers for all content, (and certainly previously considered ‘important’ content such as newspapers are suffering the harsh reality of this). What people were willing to pay for before may have been necessary, sure, but now people are willing to pay for content that’s fun, personalised, and shareable. It’s not just about getting to an access point, but how to use it, and the iPhone, iPad, Netflix, whatever the access point is, has met huge success in training consumers to pay for content. It is safe to say though that, echoing Shirky’s sentiments, not everyone might be willing to make the transition from a consumer generation that has accessed free content online by doing the exact opposite: not pay a dime.

There is loads of buzz about this today, so I won’t rehash the main arguments, but there are three points that I think are worth making.

The big switch

At the same time as most consumer brands are becoming media companies (tweeting, blogging, and engaging in heavyweight content marketing strategies), The Times is making the decision to become more of a product company. All their content is paid for, and therefore requires a utility of its own for people to make the decision to purchase. Being a product company also implies a support function, and more importantly in this case, a potentially costly sales and marketing function. Previously the Times has been focused on attracting a large online audience, by spreading its content far and wide. Now it must actively “sell” that content to create an audience. I hope there are robust plans and budgets for this.

The timing

This move obviously signals a move away from the advertising revenue model, and although advertising will be sold, the huge reduction in audience will make this a completely different ballgame. Contrast this with The Independent, which under its new ownership is serious considering taking its print titles free (as well as the websites).

The Times is betting that a small, focused, paying audience will provide for the future of their company, and their strong journalistic brand.

The Independent is (potentially) betting that large reach and advertising revenue will end up being the saviour of the company.

Although analysts are somewhat divided, it is interesting to hear the following:

“With a nascent economic recovery, advertising offers more upside potential than circulation, as has happened in previous recessions,” says Ernst & Young media analyst Luca Mastrodonato.

“The advertising market is already showing pockets of growth and maintaining a paid-for Independent would limit the potential for an advertising rebound at the title.“

The problem

As an observer, I am delighted to see these two newspapers take distinctly different approaches. We’ve been on the fence for far too long, with every paper delivering paid print versions, free online versions but threatening to charge… and losing money.

I hope The Times’ decision proves to be successful, but in the long term, I can’t see how they will maintain or grow their vastly reduced audience and brand appeal. Whatever great personalized alerts, infographics, mobile versions, community, breakthrough stories, they create, at least a handful of other international titles will offer similar. FOR FREE. And its very hard to compete with free.

“as the drunks say, you can’t fall off the floor.” Clay Shirky

The ‘floor’ is free access. Within the news market, with the utility being spreadable, quickly replicable, and almost indefenceable articles, free is a tough price to beat.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Paywalls: The Experiment Begins in June (onemanandhisblog.com)
• Times’ website charging from June (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Mail holds on to newspaper website lead (guardian.co.uk)
• What now for Lebedev’s Independent? | Peter Wilby (guardian.co.uk)
• Chrome Extensions are replacing my Google Reader. A win for publishers. (platform.idiomag.com)

The Guardian recently reviewed the startup ecosystem that is forming around providing paid-content revenue streams to newspapers, which is worth a read. But to go beyond the startups mentioned there, I have created a summary of the various approaches.

Donations – These services (like Kachingle, but see this article for more examples) hope to supplement revenues for newspapers by encouraging readers to donate voluntarily for articles they find useful. At least this concept still allows for content to be free, but I can’t imagine that many people will choose to pay. If the fact that you pay for a piece of content is broadcast subtlely to your friends, these services could provide a foundation for a more powerful content recommendation system. If I knew a friend had paid for something she recommended to me, I would be more interested in reading it.

Paywalls - Although most publishers are looking at this option as a bespoke development project, Journalism Online is looking to sign up newspapers to use a unified system which charges users to read any content within the network. This provides a ready-built system for publishers, and allows users to only pay through one gateway, and to get discounts for purchasing across all sites. I just can’t see why people won’t go elsewhere for free.

Targeting - These systems are very similar to Journalism Online, but instead of just relying on paid content, they collect and use data about user interactions (which we think is smart). ViewPass plans to use the data to target higher performing advertising, and Circulate takes a similar approach to idio by actually targeting content based on user preferences.

I hope all of the above startups manage to successfully carve out a niche and help publishers navigate the next few years. However, the fundamental problem remains: there are scant few examples where paid content is working online, with the main examples being in business news, which is often seen as a commercial necessity. And for all the talk, including a variety of strongly worded statements from leading figures like Rupert Murdoch, launch plans for mass-market paid news services still seem vague. The risk in erecting a paywall and then seeing the audience dissipate is just so high.

I have heard many people discuss Facebook or Twitter’s revenue model, and ask why they don’t just charge people a small amount for their services. And the answer is that although it might drive a lot of revenue in the short-term, it would likely end their long-term revenue potential. The audience would quickly move to competing services that are free. News organisations face exactly the same issue – it is very hard to compete with free. Or as Clay Shirky puts it: “as the drunks say, you can’t fall off the floor.”

If all newspapers charge for their online content, without offering anything of more value, online-only media outlets from AOL and Huffington Post to new startups, would rub their hands in glee, and watch their traffic and influence grow rapidly.

I do like the halfway-house that is being proposed by several news sites, where content is free, until you consume a lot of it, and then you are asked to pay a monthly fee to continue accessing it in volume. It charges those who are getting the most value from your content. But the problem is, from a user perspective, you are penalising your most loyal readers. By driving even a minority of them to find other sources for their news, you will lose a disproportionate amount of your pageviews and reader interactions.

I understand that any newspaper exec will say that charging for content is absolutely vital and also fair. I’m just concerned that it doesn’t fit the way the online audience behaves, and no newspaper exec is going to be able to force users to open their wallets against their will.

Persisting blindly with print is like...

To summarise the new reality:

• Print circulation is declining across the board, and in many cases will become unsustainable as a mass distribution channel.
• Advertising revenue in the print medium is declining rapidly, and advertising overall is becoming fragmented across many types of properties, including social networks, blogs, aggregators, and other services.
• Content is expensive, but almost no one will pay for it online.
• Publishers are able to freely reach much wider audiences than ever possible before, including new emerging markets, but the competition for eyeballs is fierce.

So the problem is huge; affecting hundreds of publishing companies, and many thousands of employees at those companies. So what can be done? Well, lots of things. And most of them simple, but its the complexity of managing many new and different models that is causing problems (well… and some crazy head-in-the-sand distractions). Even at this stage, many online business models are classed as “experiments” and are therefore not assigned due weight in the organisational plan. This leaves new businesses (like Craigslist, Monster, Facebook, WordPress, etc etc) the opportunity to leapfrog major publishers in specific areas, leading to the slow death-by-a-thousand-cuts that we now see.

Dan Blank of RBI has a good list of potential revenue streams (and he goes into more depth on the relevant options for B2B publications) which is worth reading. To provide a more general approach, I have summarised the main approaches as a framework, and then highlighted the most interesting and effective approaches I have seen. Some are fundamental shifts from the traditional publishing model that are only suitable in some contexts, and some are new revenue streams that are more universally applicable.

It is important to understand that publishers must move away from trying to monetise content, and focus on monetising their audience. This frees the publisher from a one-dimensional paid-content model, which usually won’t work, and from the relience on CPM advertising, which doesn’t seem to be working right now. New publishing business models will almost always combine many revenue streams, but the following is intended as a framework for exploring the possibilities.

A framework for the new publishing business model

Audience revenue drivers

Advertising – the more targeted and engaging the better. Standard formats don’t work best, but do reduce the cost of sales.

Affiliate/CPA – augmenting content with links to relevant products and services on an commission or cost-per-action basis. With the huge coverage of affiliate networks, and startups like Skimlinks (which turns product links into affiliate links), there are always relevant products to which readers can be referred.

Sponsored Content – clearly marked articles, videos, podcasts, and other content forms that are branded. See this post for an overview of the recent growth in sponsored content.

Content revenue drivers

Custom publishing – creating bespoke content for brands, for distribution as sponsored content or on the brand’s site or network. This post presents the case for custom publishing. A timely example is the recent launch of AOL and Sear’s collaboration on Good News Now.

Syndication – charging for republication of content in other formats and on other channels. With the rise of the link economy, this has become less profitable, but there are lots of opportunities. For example, Sunsilk’s microsite in India pulls in MSN India entertainment feeds.

Paid-content – charging users to access certain premium content. This can also include repurposing existing content into new and valuable formats such as ebooks, print, and mobile apps.

Data revenue drivers

Lead generation – connecting brands with users that an expressed or implied interest in the product offered. For a raw example, see Incisive Media’s IThound, which is a portal of premium content for the sole purpose of linking vendors with warm prospects in the technology and finance sectors.

Renting user database – conducting direct mail and email campaigns to the user database on behalf of brands.

Market research – providing anonymised preference and behaviour data for market research purposes. This is especially relevant if detailed and actionable data is being recorded as part of the publishers standard business process.

Advertising data – selling behavioural and other usage data to advertising networks for better targeting. This is only appropriate for very high-volume sites, but I have heard that a couple of advertising networks are working on easy-to-implement solutions which will allow less-trafficked sites to sell-back their data.

Brand revenue drivers

Products – selling iPhone apps, ebooks, market reports, or even physical products that are relevant to the audience. You can see an overview of iPhone apps run by magazines here, and read about a magazine that sells physical products as part of its new business model here.

Events – running events, meetups, webcasts, unconferences, panels (etc) for the audience. Many B2B publishers have been doing this for years, and given that “real-world” events are holding their value in the digital age, it is worth every publisher looking at this revenue opportunity.

Services – selling related services to the audience. This one really requires publishers to stop thinking like a traditional newspaper or magazine. Le Monde in France allows vetted bloggers to use “yourblog.lemonde.fr” subdomains for around EUR5. A website in Moldova operates in similar way.

Licensing – renting the publishing brand for use on products, events, and services of related companies.

Please let me know any improvements and comments you have on the above. Although I’ve tried to simplify the issues into a framework, I am very aware that every publisher will have to chart its own course, based on the vertical, audience requirements and other factors.

One company has bought our entire output exclusively, on-going. We are, in effect, becoming a private research company.

Our new client is unwilling to subsidise our existing audience of readers (300-400k last month) so the content that we’ll be creating — reports, video interviews and day-to-day industry news and analysis — will become proprietary from 27th of March. After this date, the public version of MIR will no longer be updated.

Previously the MIR blog has been ad supported. Switching to only allowing corporate subscribers for the fee of £12,000 pa marks a radical change in business model. Fundamentally the the aim of gathering news and researching the industry remains the same.

It is interesting to see the contrast between MIR becoming more closed with a much smaller reach and the attempt of papers such as The Guardian and NY Times to reach a larger audience through open APIs.