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Creating real value through content

9 May 2012 2 Comments

Newspapers and magazines and TV stations create Paywalls. A subject much derided, that, apparently, is the single biggest source of new revenue for these business entities.It is proving to work.

And I agree.

The time for subscription based business models is ripe. The days when people expected all content on the Net to be free are gone.

People are paying for content now. At least the more mature audience.

And if the content creators are asking the question of whether content could be charged for- they are barking up the wrong tree. The question really to ask is what kind of content could be provided- that renders itself to the medium, is engaging and not just a transposition of print or TV.

But there are other businesses shutting down. Recently, Ongo- a site based on aggregating content from various premium content publishers and selling them off for a fee- shut down. Forcing speculation over content based subscription models.

The truth is – the value of Ongo was in aggregation of content – not creating content. A little like Flipboard.

Now, there is indeed value in aggregation- but not as much as the value in creating fresh, unique engaging content.

Good content rules. It is the “Social Object” , the germSeed. It gets shared, provides context and the oil that greases the Internet.

There is value and a lot of business sense in creating high quality, engaging, real content- it does not scale fast- but the value is really in the quality and not quantity.

The good thing is that people realize this- now more than ever before. Give them good content and they will buy. Ask GigaOm. Ask SEO Moz and ask Wired.

The second good thing is- advertisers like quality content and are willing to pay for being in a quality environment. Most importantly, they themselves understand the value of quality content creation, and are investing in this area.

Content is coming of age. Or maybe a full circle.

  • http://twitter.com/sandeepbalaji sandeepbalaji

    Completely agree on what you have posted above. Content is king. The freshness of the same and different perspective attract/draw users. Similarly i am a firm believer that original content, blogs, etc..are a must rather than pure SEO :-)

  • http://twitter.com/ColinMiles Colin Miles

    I’ve pretty much spent my whole working life in publishing/writing/content in one guise or another and quite frankly I don’t think ‘pay-walls’ are the magic answer to the industry’s problems! Write it and they will come?? (pay) is really not the “value exchange” of the future. I worked initially in trade publishing where all the content (editorial, including scientific pieces) was published for free because advertisers and sponsors basically covered the costs. The “value exchange” they got was to promote their wares to the readership we had successfully built. It’s still a virtuous circle. I really think that content co-creation and social publishing are about to prove that ‘context’ is everything and topical insight not just the preserve of writers and publishers. I only hold on to the new publishing vocation of “curation” because we do still need professional folks to help us wade through the mass of information that’s out there. I recently noted the numbers on iPAD for digital magazines was flat and in general terms; social publishing concepts (via HTML5) are getting some serious traction. If you limit the audience, it’s a zero sum game, you get a specific revenue line only for the subset (of a subset) that’s prepared to jump over the wall, but you seriously lose out on the major value exchange you can potentially deliver. If we look at what DRM did to the Music industry and say we should apply that model to the publishing industry, then it’s not a very hopeful future. Still, it’s all about opinions mate, and global ‘reading credits’ or micro-payments may yet save the day for everyone!