Archive for February, 2009

To Charge or Not to Charge for Content

Published
by
Dave
on February 25, 2009
in Attention Economics, Business Models, Media and Publishing
. 1 Comment

As public lead for Creative Commons South Africa, I’m often faced with content publishers asking me questions like: How can we possibly afford to stay in business while giving away the fruits of our labour for free?

I’ll cover three basic ways.

1. Advertising

The most obvious answer is that you can make your money back from advertising. However, quality journalism and production is not cheap, so it is quite difficult to make sufficient profit from advertising and affiliate revenue alone if you’re relying on original content to bring in your readers.  Archived content can, however, provide bonus revenue from people coming across old content that you may already have recovered your costs on.

2. E-Commerce and Affiliate Revenue

A number of publications, such as Backpackers.com are using e-commerce to fund their publications (in addition to advertising). You can also get commissions from related products and services that you recommend via your site (some publications have ethical issues with this, as it can be seen to bias the writing toward the particular products/companies that affiliations have been set up with).

3. Freemium

Some companies, such as MarketingProfs, give away some of their articles for free but charge for full access to all their articles. Others, like Trendwatching, give their content away for free, but charge a premium for high-quality summaries and live presentations of it. There are many ways to apply freemium – for example, you can give free access for a limited time only, or free digital access to drive print subsriptions or attendance at events. Andrew Chen has devised a useful little spreadsheet to help you evaluate the viability of freemium for your product or service.

Chris Anderson has identified four types of free that can work in business, an article worth checking out. I’ve reproduced his visual summary below:

The Four Types of Free

Lastly, you may find that giving your content away for free doesn’t work for you. The fact is, that despite the overwhelming amounts of free content available online today, it’s still time consuming to find the best knowledge and information that you can trust and use. People, like me, are still prepared to pay a little extra for access to well researched and produced  information. Walter Isaacson wrote an insightful piece about the need to charge for content in this week’s Time magazine (which is, ironically, available for free HERE)

Oh, and by the way… Creative Commons is not all about content creators giving content away for free. Yes, you can sell your own Creative Commons licensed work, while limiting others from doing the same.  Creative Commons licenses allow others to share your work, while giving you credit for what you’ve done. They can only sell it if you have allowed for commercial use of it.

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Good Times for Digital Marketing

Published
by
Dave
on February 14, 2009
in Advertising, Marketing and Media
. 2 Comments

With the looming global financial recession, many businesses are being more cautious about where they spend their money. One of the first budgets that tends to be slashed by big businesses is Advertising and Marketing.

In light of this, more Marketers are investing a higher proportion of their budget into digital marketing solutions – online and mobile.

There are a few key reasons for this:

1. It’s easier to track the results of digital marketing, with simple analytics tools, or pay-for-performance pricing on many channels.
2. Well executed digital campaigns gather momentum and can become marketing assets.
3. Digital campaigns can simultaneously inform consumers, while gathering insight about them
4. Digital channels are two-way, so the call-to-action can be more immediate – leading to higher ROI.

Media owners whose traditional advertising earnings are on the decline are also taking alternative and innovative approaches reader engagement more seriously. See, for example, what the New York Times are doing with their “Prototypes“.

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Online Advertising Case Study – IBM in the NY Times

Published
by
Dave
on February 11, 2009
in Advertising and Case Study
. 8 Comments

We’ve heard for years that online advertising generally isn’t credible, is an annoyance, and that people are becoming adept at ignoring it. The ideal, we’ve heard (and, admittedly, preached) is to engage people in conversations about your company.

Largely, I’d say that the reason for this is that advertisers are treating online advertising as they would print advertising, very little difference in format, except that it clicks through to a landing page.

IBM is doing something interesting with their online advertising though, which I thought would be useful to model if you’re handling the advertising for a large company that often appears in the press: they’re combining the credibility of PR with the control that advertising offers.

As you can see in the ad below (from the NYT online), the advert basically aggregates some recent articles about IBM:

IBM Advert

This innovative ad format takes PR and recycles it into a paid advertising that is quite effective. However it competes with more current editorial a reader is likely visiting the site to consume.

Like similar programs from Google, efforts like these unlock the hidden value in thousands of articles deep inside archives. It takes what’s old and makes it monetizable.

Essentially they’re turning archived content into a form of advertising that’s more credible than static, generally poor-performing banners.

(via)


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Using Evidence to Improve Your Business Decisions

Published
by
Dave
on February 9, 2009
in Attention Economics, Collaboration and Crowdsourcing
. 0 Comments

Companies that have access to better quality information make more profitable decisions. This is the finding of a recent McKinsey Global Survey entitled: “How companies make good decisions“.

In the world of Marketing, there are many people willing to offer advice and opinion, but how do you know what’s actually worthwhile paying attention to? The answer is more about having an info-filtering and decision-making process than about knowing which guru’s blog to read.

I think that The 5 Principles of Evidence Based Management (via) could serve as a useful guideline for marketers and managers operating in fast-changing environments

1. Face the hard facts, and build a culture in which people are encouraged to tell the truth, even if it is unpleasant.
2. Be committed to “fact based” decision making — which means being committed to getting the best evidence and using it to guide actions.
3. Treat your organisation as an unfinished prototype — encourage experimentation and learning by doing.
4. Look for the risks and drawbacks in what people recommend — even the best medicine has side effects.
5. Avoid basing decisions on untested but strongly held beliefs, what you have done in the past, or on uncritical “benchmarking” of what winners do.

This approach also compliments the “Value Creation in a Wild Wired World” model, which favours an iterative, collaborative approach based on on-going engagement and application of  feedback and evidence.

Update: Jacques Rousseau, who convenes UCTs “Evidence Based Management” course, has just put up a blog post about the subject entitled “Teaching EBMgt: developing better managers, or educating critical thinkers?“.

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