Day 10 Publishing Monetisation Model - Challenging Convention in Publishing (am) and New Advances (pm)

Morning Session - Publishing Monetisation Model - Challenging Convention in Publishing

Nominated trainers
Ian Jindal, editor in chief, Internet Retailing

Introduction

New business models are not necessarily the existing models 'made digital': digital publishing offers new ways of making money, while previously-lucrative models lose their lustre online. This session will examine the fundamental tenets of commercialising digital publishing along with a practical and analytical approach to unlocking value from publishing activities - the 'publishing monetisation model'.

Revenue Sources

Revenues online come from the following areas:

Customers paying to access or use content or services
Advertisers paying to be near a customer segment that the publisher has attracted, undertaking key tasks or at a commercially-relevant decision point
Providing a 'publishing service' to an intermediary (a form of 'contract publishing').

Revenue Dimensions

Revenue yields in each of the above areas can be increased by:

Volume - increasing the flow through or reach of your site
Targeting - improved relevance of your audience to advertisers
Utility - the greater the usefulness or necessity of content the greater the propensity to pay for it

The first part of the session will examine approaches to exploiting the sources and dimensions.

The second part of the session will consider how to "unlock value" from a publishing process with regard to an online audience.

The session will cover a 'workshop-style' approach to connect the publisher's capabilities with the customer's needs.

The components identified are:

Domain expertise - the true 'assets' of a publisher: the creation, ordering and dissemination of information, access to sources, reputation and credentials, knowledge
Customer domain - the customer's needs, desires and interests for which they'll pay (or for which others will pay on their behalf)
Tools - the capabilities in terms of technology, workflow, widgets that are available to the publisher and customer further to exploit domain insights.

Each of these areas will be harvested for opportunities and then:

Assessed against a Feasibility Matrix
Assessed against a Commercial Matrix (mainly to ensure that each and every commercial opportunity is being exploited).

The outcome of the session overall will be a deeper insight into business models that can work well in a digital world as well as a working approach to unlock value and aid commercial planning.

Afternoon Session - New Advances - Widgets, Microformats

Nominated trainers
Ian Jindal, Editor in Chief, Internet Retailing

In the move from traditional to digital publishing the "unit of value" was changed. Rather than being an "issue" or "book" or other unit of distribution and purchase, it is now the individual article, or summary which has taken on a new, independent economic value.

The level of granularity has increased: from RSS headlines and alerts to individual lines of data (eg an individual stock movement).

This increased granularity has many challenges, including payments (the need for micropayment), how to monetise the less popular 'articles', and working the 'long tail' of archive material.

This afternoon session will outline emerging trends for digital publishers - for new services, new challenges and radical challenges to the way their data is created, managed and disseminated. Throughout, however we will maintain a commercial, strategic focus and consider:

The commercial impact of this increased granularity
The operational and planning overhead imposed by more granular data use
Opportunities to combine these smaller data entities into new services (whether 'mashups' in a Web 2.0 sense or value-added services in a more traditional sense)
Licencing and management implications

Widgets

A category of tools is emerging that can take sources of microdata and aggregate and use these sources, configured by the customer. In this session we will consider the commercial opportunities of being a widget 'publisher' or supporting their use by customers.

Microformats

Beyond simple granularity there is a move towards data fragments becoming:

Standardised (eg appointments, contacts, events)
Self-describing (ie the data tells other applications about its context, source, provenance etc)

These new formats are a function of both increased data interoperability on the web and moves towards the 'Semantic Web' (where data has meaning and context and is not simply 'text on a digital page'). We will examine opportunities for publishers in which a single entry in a database can become a stand-alone microformat and be sold separately from the original database.

Metadata and New Markup

The session will conclude with new opportunities to monetise metadata - specifically where previous-static data is "used" by customers in a digital world.

Each interaction online or in a digital format can be tracked and - when joined with the profile of the person viewing or using the data - metadata is created. At a simple level this can be frequency or popularity information, but at a more sophisticated level it can give insights into the behavioural patterns of customers.

There are new intersections between publishers and transactional information or logs and these will be explored to conclude the session, based upon the latest examples available.