A friend writes:
I’m puzzling through an idea–of extreme poles in new editorial models…and curious how you foresee a media landscape that allows for Demand Media (this) and and Mediastorm (this). There are some really interesting commonalities under the hood of how these products are assembled and how execs at various companies see licensing and syndication and the future of content. What’s your take?
Great questions.
As I understand it, the Demand model is predicated on extreme micromedia production. Early on, Demand bought top level domains of users’ spelling errors: you typed deman.com instead of demand.com, Demand bought deman.com and filled the page with content that would sell related Google ads. Eventually, Demand began to generate new authored content to fill those pages. And now it has a micromedia “own & operate” model that makes it more lethal than, say About.com—which relies upon expensive journalistically legitimized authoring.
What’s interesting about the Demand model is that it seems to prove out Umair Haque’s Media Economics theory that new technologies have vaporized production costs and created new economies of scale and scope in search, production, and distribution, making production far less expensive relative to buying attention. Smart aggregators in the micromedia world such as Demand are now becoming major media players, using behavioral matches to SERP to place their bets on which subject areas to invest: an efficient relationship of content production to customer need. In the long run this has a chance of becoming an irresistable black box portfolio investment model of content production. Demand isn’t a “nichepaper” as Haque recently called for in his “Nichepaper manfesto”: it’s the extreme of micromedia, but imo it’s the extreme that will ultimately push nichepapers to real innovation at the margin. (I’ll write about Haque’s Nichepaper manifesto at a later date, but this piece actually contains some of my qualms about it.)
The X Games: Xtreme Micro meets Xtreme Macro
So what about the other side of my friend’s question How can you have a big enough tent to support experiementation at the level of narrative. Mediastorm, like the work Jonathan Harris does with Sputnik Observatory, is an artisanal multimedia company creating new journalistic narratives; both it and Harris’s Sptnk are also non-profits. They seem to fly in the face of the smart aggregation theme. How can they survive in the same ecosystem when economies of scale seem to congregate around low margin data plays?
My answer: I don’t think they can, at least not outside the non-profit realm. Artisanal production doesn’t scale. Not that what they are doing isn’t valuable: this is exactly the right kind of innovation at the front-end of narrative remix that magazines need to cozy up with if they intend to survive in an e-book world where there are higher margins and costs. And there’s good economics here too: as Haque says, companies that invest in “altering, remixing, and filtering microchunks” are the aggregator 3.0: he calls ‘em Reconstructors. They consolidate vertically and then fragment vertically. They are in essence “broadcatchers” who believe that “people will consume the media they like best.”
But wait a minute: That sounds just like the Demand model.
A more likely model for the production side is what Demand is doing in terms of cheap production, what Visible World is doing in terms of cheap, modularized TV ad production—in case you missed it, Google did a deal with Visible World last week to abet its tv advertising—and to get increasingly focused using metadata production and semantic technologies such as DITA to mesh taxonomical CMS categories along with SERP and user-based tags and create dynamically generated aggregated results pages. (Let’s also mention Mahalo while we’re at it: Jason Calcanis’s company is combining high- and low-touch elements together to make search more authentic and matched to customer need.)
Touch me, baby
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think high level editorial touch is going anywhere. You can’t use machines to generate moral purpose and one thing that’s perpetually left out of this debate about the future of newspapers and the scale economies that Reconstructors and Broadcatchers can achieve—the essential impact editors can bring to aggregation. That’s one reason I think the AOL model will be a winner: someone (editors) needs to bring the moral outrage, aesthetic value, and connective heart to content, and machines can’t do that.
So we’re stuck somewhere in the middle between the extreme micromedia and extreme artisanal remix production. Just where we should be, because the truth is that what’s needed is different strokes for different folks: different kinds of companies and even different units within companies have different needs.
If you have a big vertical database of SERP in something like real estate, autos, or dating. you’re going to need much more data efficiency at levels of geography and cost than you would if you were publishing politics or gossip or movies. The data needs are very different. Gossip and politics and personal finance can also benefit from the principles of Reconstruction—on both the front-and-back-end.
Conversely, microniches and vertical segments with strong SERP need real human touch to come alive: Consumers want more than data. They want passionate engagement and love for real estate porn or for more consumer transparency with auto dealers or more focus on sustainable transportationwhen in addition to—maybe even as an engine of—search. But as I said, your mileage may vary depending on how close you are to SERPs.
Remember the future of mass customization? Happy consumers, beaming with pride that the great masters of manufacturing allowed them the privilege of mixing their own batch of stuff from the rich storehouse of a brand? This happy, shiny future has been repeatedly trotted out for various industries over the past few decades, usually to be set aside because of the real costs to transforming manufacturing lines, and servicing millions of unique products. When it works, for example, in design objects, it can have interesting results; in technology, it’s usually a dodge from innovation. And now it’s being trotted out again, this time for media, by Time Inc., which—in mid crisis—has had the epiphany there might be potential consumer interest in letting consumers mix n match content from a bunch of its current titles.
The title of Time’s “experiment” in free, customized content: Mine, Here’s how it works. You go to the Mine website, pick five of eight offered magazines (Time, Sports Illustrated, Real Simple, Money, Travel&Leisure, InStyle, Golf, Food+Wine), and about six weeks later, get a magazine composed of articles poached by Time Inc. from those five titles, om print or digital format, customized to your zipcode. (Free info: mine were Time, T&L, Instyle, F+W, Money.)
Wow, you’re saying. That’s a lot of free content. Great value to the advertiser (Lexus sponsors the whole shebang). Geo-targeted. Wow, cool stuff.
Except, um, no. You can only get either digital or print edition. (You can also put an rss widget on your iGoogle page.) And the content, apparently, runs from 2005 to 2009—let’s repeat that too, shall we: from 2005 to 2009—and is organized less like a single magazine than a bunch of magazines each separated in its own tidy branded cordon sanitaire with ad pages marking it off from the other brands. I haven’t seen the digital edition, so I won’t comment on its execution, but I think I have something to say about its general concept. After all, I was part of the team that first suggested this idea back in 1995…
15 years ago
Turns out this is an idea that’s been kicking around at least since the days of what was known first as Time Inc New Media and then, after ATT and MCI failed to convince us proprietary X25 networks were tomorrow’s big thing, the Time Inc Internet Project and finally Pathfinder. Locked in a bake-off for the top job, Jim Kinsella and I set out our competing visions of Time Inc’s internet future for our boss, Walter Isaacson.
My vision was Calliope. Unfortunately that domain was already taken—already in 1994! (If the domain was available, who knows what would have happened!) Calliope was to be a unitary effort from all of Time’s (then) 35 brands. One article from here, another from over there, sometimes even on the same subject, with community comments and email underlying the whole shebang.
Kinsella’s idea was Pathfinder: a home page designed to send you to each of those brand’s websites, and minimal editorial resources under that. Just what the name says. As I said to Jim (who ever let me forget it), Calliope was centrifugal, Pathfinder, centripetal. Kinsella, who has had an amazing career and is now chairman of Interoute, one of the largest European network providers, was right though: by pledging to keep Pathfinder limited in its intent and range, he could cobble enough resources to build the ostensibly decentralized brand into a strong centralized organization. (A brilliant corporate insight, I came to recognize much later.) My way would have meant the brands wouldn’t have had a base to build from without spending their own money (which they didn’t have or didn’t want to spend online) and would have created a new editorial hierarchy, presumably with Isaacson as king. (To his credit, he didn’t go for that, and 15 years later, he’s still just as savvy, kicking off the recent debate about micropayments with a TIME cover.) One publisher flatly told me to go F myself. Isaacson didn’t support me. And as for getting the brands to collaborate? On his way out the door, Curt Viebranz, who came to TINM from HBO (and was later president of Tacoda and a top exec at AOL until Falco etc. pushed him out), famously said that working at Pathfinder was like trying to herd a group of cats. (A lot of this ancient history is in John Motavalli’s rather misguided Bamboozled at the Revolution.)
One more person should be mentioned in all of this: Bruce Judson, a talented exec who came to Pathfinder with dual JD/MBA degrees and the rep of a Time Inc superstar thanks to his championing selective inkjet printing—the same (or very very similar) technology they’re using to print Mine.
Dumb and dumber
So why is a dumb idea from 1995 any better regurgitated fifteen years later?
It’s not. It’s even dumber.
Here’s why: in the Google era, mass customization, giving consumers the choice to design their own product from the limited set of a firm’s products, is not customer service for the masses. If anything it is the opposite—it is innovation with a limited set of consumers—and healthy margins—in mind. If you love Time Inc magazines more than all other content and think it deserves a privileged place in your home, then perhaps this is media for you. Of course if you really thought this way, you’d subscribe to all the magzines independently. As Scott Anthony says, this is innovation through the wrong lens: the lens of the guy who works at Time Inc and grabs copies of all the magazines that used to be given away free to employees in the lobby; he reads a few articles and chucks the rest in the john and the garbage. This is innovation to help himself, not the customer. As Anthony writes:
The general point here is to make sure you evaluate innovations through the proper lens. The trap companies often run into is they think their view of quality is the same as the markets’. That’s not always true. If the innovation isn’t perceived to be better by the consumer, customer, partner, or supplier to whom it is targeted, then adoption could slow and frustration could grow.
If Time Inc’s poobahs—the url says timecmg.com, so this is likely some consumer marketing group Ann Moore has lashed together including her publishers, Time Inc Custom Solutions, and somebody in online (i.e., the rump of Pathfinder)—were truly interested in innovating customer service in the media context—and if their CMS was up to it—they’d be looking for taxonomical matches between articles and metatagged subjects and user metatags. They’d be taking a page from the New York Times, specifically Times Extra, which lets you see the Times’s own headlines and stories right on the same page with external links to competing versions of the same stories. They’d be hackging the hello out of the Daylife API, creating filtered news programs running across the range of all Time Inc. content and affiliates. Or maybe they’d just do Time’s Mahalo, allowing search under the banner of high touch contextual curation. Yeah, I know it’s an experiment, but it’s not a good one. What’s the next experiment? Subscriptions for your customized magazine and micropayments for the online version?
This is how a dumb idea from 1995 is being made even dumber in 2009, relying on the hubris of publishers who think customers want customized magazine content over and above context created from across the entire web of news resources. What was innovative—but wrong in 1995—is no more innovative in 2009.
Some people never learn.
CODA, 4/19: The AP reports—and Time Inc is now apologizing—for botching the personalization of Mine’s first issue. Apparently few readers got the five titles they actually picked; most of the articles were evergreen, dating back to summer 2008, and at least one person, Joshua Benton, director of Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab, found the personalized ads—all featuring Lexus— “’slightly creepy’ because they referred to where he lives, included his name and described him driving one on Route 6 to Cape Cod.” Argh.
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