Media Center session on Next Generation Media: How Do Businesses Change as Disintermediation Nibbles Away at Their Margins?
Scott Rafer, Feedster
Google, Yahoo Local and A9 Yellow Pages as new intermediaries.
Microsoft takes a $10 billion market and crushes it into a $1 billion market they own. Revenue drops by 90%, technology lowers costs by 99% and $90 million is "left over" every year. We are all using open source, cost infrastructure will be based on it.
25% of new eBay auctions posted via eBay web services according to the Pew Study.
In a month jobs.feedster.com will have more job listings than Monster.com. Anyone can build a job site on top of their data. Suggestion to the audience: become part of the problem. Be an intermediary. Use lightweight structure. Be the center of an ecology of content and technology. Specialize and integrate. Use open source.
Sold my Oracle stock a while ago, MySQL provides service on 2% on 7M deployments and are making good money.
Jim Kennedy, Vice President and Director of Strategic Planning, The Associated Press
155 year organization has faced these issues before, hired one guy to row a boat, telegraph, etc. Innovator's Dilemma, but want to advance technology. The container is not the thing that we set up and hope people come to it, the net is moving bits where they need to go, balance of power shifted from suppliers to makers of content and they will reassemble it in their own way. Desktop, settop and cell phone as new containers. Have to play and move to platforms -- consumers use our brand needs to attach to the content and not just the container and we have to be okay with people picking up the content and even playing with it in its own way. How can we make it simpler, easier to get the info they want instead of searching through a mess of feeds. All for free and open access, but not free as in doesn't cost anything. There is a continuing value to the journalism we do. Even with tremendous growth rates of online advertising, it doesn't come close to funding a news organization.
Jay Harris, Publisher, Mother Jones magazine
30 years old next year (the magazine). Associated with progressive political values and investigative reporting. Something we try to carry forward. A non-profit. Citation of their stories accrues to their reputation. Got in early and adapted to use the medium for what it was good for (e.g. putting database of campaign donors online). Sell subscriptions, take donations and advertise online. But its a centralized brand. Making the shift means keeping the quality of the journalism intact. Fact checking mechanism. Tapping into the grassroots energy while maintaining the quality is the issue. Grade The News project.
Jeff Clavier is speaking on behalf of BuzzNet (Flickr didn't show)
Jeff worked with Reuters for 10 years, on the VC side, but gets the issues. Simple mobile and web-based mobile communication platform. Demos Buzznet, he has a cool Winoblog. Business model: Buzznet.com has premium services, advertising and sponsorship, e-commerce; but unlike Flickr, they are a Platform for event and artist promotion, brand development (co-branded or white label). Shows the example of the Ventura County Star and a fan site spammed by an independent Goth band.
Discussion
Lingering question for Jim Kennedy is, what's the business model in all this? The expense of covering the news is getting bigger all the time, how to get partners to help fund it, fund the infrastructure (mentions DRM, B2B commerce)? Infrastructure for the user experience is highly advanced, but the infrastructure that helps people get paid is immature. Huge undertaking. What will happen while working on it, the missed opportunities, is like taking the engine out of the plane while in the air. When asked, what if you didn't have the legacy, is there enough audience left? Combination of pieces must be different content, subscription, classifieds has worked well, but now need to rethink the model. Will it be at the scale and margins that big public companies demand?
