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New Realities in Publishing (I)

Angelique van Engelen - 5/21/2005

Today's publishing environment is getting cut throat and business intelligence is key. A clear view of the prime intersecting points in this industry itself is essential. Free content might well be the largest intersection where editors and webmasters meet. Many people wonder who facilitates all this sugar-and-spice world of free information. How is it possible that whilst you pay good money for your daily newspaper, you can get whatever is written in the paper times 500 for free on the internet? The short answer is one word: distribution.

Distribution, or aggregation of content as a totally free commodity is quite a new idea but it started to become important seven years ago, when publishers became more and more enticed with the idea that advertising revenue based business models were overtaking subscriptions in terms of attraction. It meant quite a gamble, but when new titles showed the viability and profitability of this model, very many other publications followed suit. It was going to be the idea of the future and the advertising driven revenue model has dominated the internet publishing sector from its very start.

Free content has since evolved and is very likely here to stay, since new business models are adopting the principle and weave alternative income streams around it. As Jeff Jarvis from www.buzzmachine.com says; "This is the new distributed world. I don't know how anybody makes money in it but I do see how many people save money. As has been cited too often now, Craig destroyed - did not transfer but destroyed - an estimated $65 million in classified revenue in San Francisco alone. But Craig still charges for listing jobs. Indeed doesn't; it merely finds them."

Craig being Craig's list, a highly successful aggregator, first of jobs and now everything under the sun in the classifieds market and Indeed being a similar outfit. Jarvis goes on to point out that "aggregation is cheap. Aggregation is efficient." And he's right. I have yet to come across estimates of the value of the so called 'free' content market across the internet, but this is of less relevance than its new role. Companies looking to cut costs, turn to free content. This way, it is playing an incredible role in the economy. It is valued but as an economic instrument, rather than a commodity with a usual price tag.

Content is King and at a 'Kingly' fee. You might say that the tax exemption that most countries reserve for their royalty translates in cyber ventures as publishers' inability to use content as a control tool in the traditional way. "The technology won't allow that to happen. You can't "get to scale" that way", says Jarvis.

The open source idea of content makes all of us a little bit more amenable to outsiders. It is simply impossible for one player to have all the goodies on one particular subject. "You must be open to others owning pieces of the equation. You must let the users get the value of scale however they choose to create that scale. You must facilitate the creation of virtual scale", says Jarvis.

As we are being democratised by technology this way, we are likely to adopt a totally new idea of achieving economies of scale and critical mass. This term as such is slowly dying out. Scale simply don't scale anymore. It's over guys. Nobody believes in authoritarian pretense no more. There's always a fifth if not sixth opinion if you've managed to convince everybody you monopolise the first four.

Aggregation is the new economics of scale. To get through to target markets, keyword rich text that at once simple yet crafted to reach a target market without with the your message clearly. It needs to be concise and on target. Aggregation in cyber space is similar to decentralisation in the rest of society. It's getting more popular. People all over the world are getting the hang of spontaneously forming clusters grouping together in schemes, outmanoeuvering companies and governmental organisations. A degree of anarchy is taking hold of reality in a way we have never seen before.

The people who were present at the birth of the world wide web had hoped for a lot more than just free content. They had hoped for even less limitations and domination by business entities out there to make money. The decline of sites like Napster have been lamented by many with high ideals for similar ideas to transform other parts of society. But the previous few years have shown that it's old world economics that really drives the New Economy. It's the old world corporations that simply learnt the tricks of the trade and have thus been able to expand their grip on the New Economy. In the free content story, this translates as clustering being the key around which everything evolves.

News aggregators are all very busy categorising their news in recognisable categories. All you need to do is hitch up with a few people in creating either a new category or establishing yourself as a player in a recognized field and submit your feeds. People that take them are of course Yahoo.com, but also lesser known entities such as Newsnow.co.uk and Daypop.com. Not to speak of the blog possibilities, which are endless.