If Content Isn’t King, What Is?
If we think back to some of the endearing trends of the internet age, one that has come and gone and perhaps come again says content is king. When someone asks for advice when starting an online site, that’s what most people will say. They will tell the person to focus on their content. What exactly is content, though? This article is content. The Onion is full of funny content, the NYTimes.com with more serious content. What about YouTube? It doesn’t have much in the way of written words, but there is certainly a lot of digital media to consume. Facebook would be the same. It isn’t the Times, but it has more videos and more photos than just about any other site. Then there are sites that fall in the middle like newly public Demand Media. They must have content because they are accused of being a content farm. Unlike publications with a dedicated staff of writers or blogs with passionate individuals, they look for keywords without much content and look to fill the void by inserting some of theirs. It’s attracted the lovely title of search engine spam.
Content may be king, but it’s the means to an end. Content as king is really a proxy for something that matters much more, an audience. When we think about those in the content business, we are really talking about those in the audience business. You can write your own content or create platforms for aggregating and enabling others. At the end of the day, the focus is on creating an audience or borrowing from the Twitter nomenclature, a following. Once you have it, then comes the fun part, monetizing it. The distinction between just having eyeballs and audience is a very important one, an essential one really when you want to make money off of content.
Let’s compare and contrast the Onion with Demand Media’s content farm. A look right now shows titles of, “Massive Snowstorm Leaves Thousands Without Access To Pornography,” and “Denis Leary Drops By Comedy Club To Try Out New Ford Commercial.” Not the most high intent traffic but one that will leave you struggling to find any AdSense on their pages. You will find ads from Mini Cooper, Axe Body Wash, and several high profile films and blockbuster video games. That is not the case with the long-tail content associated with Demand Media properties. You won’t find any brand dollars, but you will find plenty of click based ads. Both sites have lots of content, and Demand Media has a bigger audience, so it has to be about more than the content. And, of course it is. It’s about the loyalty that audience has to the content creators. The greater the loyalty, the greater the monetization options.
Content’s role in creating an audience hasn’t changed dramatically. The biggest change over the past year and a half are the options that audience owners have to monetize their content. Historically, it had been a combination of two models, sell ads or sell subscriptions to the content. There’s certainly nothing wrong with ads or subscriptions, but none have really done the trick for certain types of content sites. Great media properties are littered with the remains of underwhelming online ad and subscription revenue. Some of the best content brands are going out of business or downsizing as a result. The main reason is that they have not been able to justify high prices for all of their inventory; plus, they haven’t been able to capture a piece of the offline transaction pie. That’s now changing.
It’s way too soon to usher in the new heyday of audience, but help has started to come from a most unexpected source – the daily deal sites. You might be tempted to think that because the daily deal sites like Groupon and Living Social spend so much money, that that has been the source of the optimism. Their media spends don’t hurt, but their real benefit has been showing how the pre-paid voucher model can dramatically unlock the value that an audience brings. Instead of just being a conduit for advertisers, the media company can now claim a piece of the dollars they create. That’s one part. The second part is that until now, ads have been ads. They have not been content. The daily deals are changing the ad as just an ad paradigm. The deals are content and users like them. The deal sites get it. That’s why they often pitch their wares as city guides. It’s the perfect vehicle for a company with a brand that users already know and trust.
The deal model offers that trusted quantity a way to showcase their content leadership and get paid for it. Take a look at the companies who have made the shift including two well known public companies – OpenTable and Travelzoo.
Hearst Media has invested in one daily deal site, and in Australia, the major public television stations all own their own deal brand. No stations in the US do, but in the upcoming months we are sure to see major publications, perhaps not the New York Times, but other trusted owners of eyeballs launching their own. They are finally getting to take advantage of the long held belief of content being king or more accurately that building an audience is monetizable.
