Content Decoded

In a perfectly timed article for Contagious Magazine Faris Yakob (Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson) debunks the “Content is King” aphorism in favor of “Content is the Republic.”

At the heart of Yakob’s thesis are two ideas:

1) As more consumers produce content, traditional content monetization models (paid, advertising) are challenged. Because digital content is platform agnostic (no distinction between video, news, articles – it’s all content online) it creates room for different monetization models based on context and consumer desire.

2) Align servicing next to content: iTunes has been successful because it made buying music simple and cheap enough. Youtube is experimenting with a new monetization model by allowing users to offer high-quality downloads of videos for low prices.

I agree fully with the issues Faris raises here, however, I think that this dialog and the issue of content monetization is incomplete without further exploration of the idea of content curation. Incidentally, in the comments section of Faris’s post, Carl from the Communications Room makes a very interesting observation,

I’d like to see some kind of Stack Magazine/Ad Exchange model. I don’t want to pay $20 a month each across 20 different publishers. But I might pay $40 a month for access to all those publishers. They then share the money between them based on the content people use across the networks. It also makes publishers compete to create really good content.

Carl’s comment reminds me of HSBC’s 2-week pilot effort to market its Premier Card – personalized in-flight magazines. A kiosk located at Heathrow Terminal allows passengers to select magazine articles on topics they are interested in and have them bound into a hardback form they can take on their flight.

Time Inc’s Mine Magazine took it a step further by allowing subscribers to pick their favorite topics and four Time Inc magazines to receive a curated/ personalized magazien featuring articles that reflect the subscriber’s selection.

While the results from these early experiments are still unavailable, additional services that refine and evolve this idea have popped up. (offbeatguides.com, idiomag.com, fuelfortravel.com)

An indication of the future ?

Read The Content Republic here.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 9:54 am and is filed under Curation, Distribution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.