Publisher Brands for Content Discovery, Not Distribution

Publishers are being disintermediated in their role of content gatekeeper for their audience.  As a consumer, I am not limited in my choice of articles or books to read by the decisions made by editors at my local newspaper or one of the few national publishers.  Their judgment was a necessary value in a world when content was scarce and distribution was a barrier.  But content is no longer scare, with exponentially more options, and I cannot possibly consume much more than I am now.  So I still need help deciding what to read.

When a speaker announced at a January book conference that more books were published during that week than in all of 1950 I was not really surprised yet taken aback at the same time.*  I have so many more choices as a consumer, and content is being created and published that would never have seen the light of day in the past.  Some of it must be more relevant to me than what was traditionally chosen for more mass audiences.

So how do I find it?  The wisdom of crowds lover in me wants to believe that quality will rise to the top. The population will find what is good and elevate it better than any small crowd of trained editors or physical retailers ever could.  But in reality I can't see that effectively working, especially as my definition of quality content includes what is personally relevant.

This is why I believe the personal discovery process for content is the biggest opportunity right now.  There is a lot of innovation happening across all types of content.   Some companies are focusing on algorithms using simple user inputs (Google, Amazon, Netflix, Zite), and others are looking for social connections to find more relevant content (Facebook, Goodreads, Spotify.)  Most are beginning to incorporate both aspects.  All of those companies I just mentioned do a decent job of finding new content specifically for me.

But what about those publishers with their teams of editors who used to pick what I should read?  Do they still have a role in this world?  I think they just might.

While they cannot ignore the trends toward personalization or they will be completely left behind, they do have a head start over any technology upstarts at understanding specific audiences and communities.  And more importantly they (at least for the moment still) have the ability to fund and sponsor content creation.  Publishers appear to be losing the battle of distribution--other companies are doing it better, in more personalized ways--but they still have brands that mean something to audiences.  The same great article has more weight under the flag or The New Yorker than it does under noname.com.

So how can publishers use this brand equity? A recent announcement from Forbes might be one example.  They are asking contributing writers to take responsibility to build their own individual audiences online with content that goes beyond what appears in the standard publication.  And they are compensating them for it.  This allows Forbes the ability not just to expand their total audience, but to sponsor many more content creators than they would have before and add more support, especially financially, to those that appear wise to the crowds.  It works for the contributors by giving them the Forbes banner and promotion to give them a boost to be noticed in the increasingly saturated sea of content.  And it will benefit me, the consumer, but highlighting content choices as Forbes-approved if I believe their brand is appropriate for me.

I expect we will see more ideas like this from publishers, not just in news, but in books, music, and other entertainment.  They will focus more on their brand and using its equity to facilitate the discovery of content for their audiences, especially for those with specific, defined, even niche audiences.  This could even be done without publishing or distributing actual content.  No one has figured out how to monetize their brands separate from distribution-based business models yet, but it is inevitable as they are forced to reconsider their very missions and look at where their value truly resides.

UPDATE: Here is a recent example of blogger Joshua Gans, someone I have enjoyed for several years, moving over to the Forbes brand. http://gametheorist.blogspot.com/2012/03/new-parentonomics-blog.html



* I have not fact checked this statement, but considering the explosion of self publishing and publishing upstarts and opportunities, the idea is surely correct even if the number is not completely true.

Ho Hum, Students Do Not Really Want Digital Content

According to a survey of college students, "if all things were equal (price and availability), students would choose to use e-textbooks 47% of the time" versus print text books.  The knee jerk headlines are that good old fashioned printed text books are still favored by a lot of students, so slow down all of the predictions of the revolutionary market.

But what if this survey is done five years from now, with students who have lived in the world of iPad since they were pre-teens?  I bet it will be much higher.  And when my kids (ages 2 and 5) are approaching college, or even in high school after living with advanced mobile devices their entire remembered life?  I'm sure they will be much closer to 100% than 50%.

So given the time to develop products and markets, I would bet right now on demand for a totally digital text book. 

This reminds me of when I was in college in the mid-late 1990s during the earliest adoption on the Internet.  Here is a study from 1997 that looked at whether college students would want to use email and computers for education.  The conclusion?  There's not a big demand from students.  Even "when students are given large incentives to use e-mail, over a quarter of the students in one class did not."