Vertical Acuity Blog

Announcement of Washington Post’s  new Aggregation service – Trove:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/20/the-washington-post-launches-trove-a-personalized-social-news-site/

And my comments…..

Very Interesting. This is absolutely a move in the right direction for the publishing industry. For newspapers and other publishers to thrive they must become the new “Huff Po’s” and “Flipboard’s” and not allow these new models to disintermeidate them from their consumers and from control over the economics of their content. While this pure aggregation service is interesting – it also is widely available from many folks in many formats. A step in the right direction there is so much more that could be done by folks with such incredible brands and devoted audiences. Any model that sends consumers off site for most of there browsing time does not make much sense economically. WaPo needs a solution that keeps the attention of their consumers and levers up technology at the same time.

What would really be powerful is if WaPo integrated its core content offering and brand voice with a new version of aggregation — one which does not send the consumer flying around to many different sites to find what they want. WaPo does not want to send traffic away and consumers are tired of going to 20 sites to find 20 things they want to read (this is why Flipboard is doing so well). Seems like WaPo could allows other publishers content directly into their site — carefully curated for WaPo’s voice. This would marry aggregation with digital curation and provide both consumers and publishers a better option. Publisher keep consumers on their site and make more money from advertising and consumers get to discover content from around the web through the lens of a trusted brand – WaPo.

The infrastructure to support this new type of aggregation or digital curation is coming…..

Gregg Freishtat
CEO, Vertical Acuity.

Great piece

http://mashable.com/2011/04/12/social-journalism-quality/

And my comments……

Spot on analysis of the shift from “link economy” driven by page rank to a “social economy” where the quality of the content and experience is the driving factor determine both discovery and monetization.  Consumers will “like” and “share” good content and good experiences.  This a far better proxy for good content than the artificial construct of “links” and Page Rank which has dominated discovery for the past 5 years.  Using links to satisfy the SEO gods just does not provide a very good consumer experience (made even worse by the content farms).  Consumers do not want to visit 6 sites for 6 pieces of related content.   The link economy also fragments audience and has been a major factor in the current dislocation of the economics of online publishing.
We are at the beginning of a new phase of “content discovery” – in part because of the rise of social media and slow decline of search as the prominent means of discovery.  This shift is only part of the story.  Just as portals gave way to Google/Search and Google/Search is now giving way to Social, new technologies and business models are emerging which empower publishers to “curate” not only their content but others content.  In this new paradigm, content can “route” or flow far more freely to the consumer instead of the consumer having to visit all the sites that the content used to “live on”.
As page rank declines as a primary driver of site economics, publishers will become more and more amenable to allowing their content to be monetized on sites they do not directly own or control — so long as they are paid for the use of their content.  Likewise, publishers will become more and more amenable to curating and monetizing others content on their own site — so long as they have granular control over the content and the profitability to using others content.  This shift in content discovery will foster better content/experiences.  In turn, folks will “like” or “share” what they like and the virtuous cycle of Social media kicks in.
While Social media is the current driver of many changes in the economics of online content, it is just one piece of a rapidly evolving landscape for online publishers.  We are working on some of these issues at Vertical Acuity and call the emerging space “content logistics”
Gregg FreishtatCEO, Vertical Acuity

Google has forever changed consumer expectations.  Consumers expect absolute depth and breadth on every topic and know that if the site they are on does not provide it, they simply hit the back button and move down the list of search results to another site.  Everyone knows this fragmentation is devastating to publishers and very good for Google, Facebook and others in the “Discovery layer” of the web.

Of course, no publisher can afford to create more and more content to satisfy this new expanded consumer expectation.   This genie is not going back in the bottle.  Reading anything from “cover to cover” b/c of the brand is a dying model.  Folks are walking up to the newsstand and yanking 2 pages from 12 different publications and not paying the cover price for any….  This fragmentation has dislocated the publishing ecosystem.  Its not that different from the dislocation in telecommunications and then the music industries.  Both industries now have new models with new leaders making lots of money.  Just different folks and different size industries.  However, there is more music & communications now than there ever was.  News is not going away – its just the economics of the business that are going to be replaced by new models.

Since publishers cannot organically and profitably meet consumer expectations, new models are required. Content owners must find a frictionless way to monetize their best content across a broader array of audiences than they could possibly attract to their “site”.  Getting uniques and traffic as a priority will yield to discovering how to best monetize content where ever it is in demand.  Likewise, when publishers have a captive audience, they cannot afford to create all the content required to keep them engaged and loyal — the math just does not work and is why lay offs have been required.   However, publishers soon will be able to frictionlessly bring in curated content from any other source on the Internet – legally and on demand.   Indeed, publishers may be in the cat bird seat and not yet know it.  Strong brands need to become the “point of discovery” for not just their own content but for content consistent with their voice/brand and in line with their business model of monetizing audience.   In this way, consumers would be able to “discover” content from around the web ($0 cost of goods to publisher) through the lens of the publisher.  Publishers need to take a page out of the “discovery” folks play book and be the leaders of new models of content discovery.

We call this new model Content Logistics and our Digital Curation and Partner Management capabilities make it possible.

Gregg Freishtat
CEO, VerticalAcuity

Amazon’s new cloud player announcement is a lot bigger than just a new way to store and listen to your music.  It used to be that music, pictures, movies and like were such big files that they were both cumbersome to work with and took up the majority of space on “your” hard drive.   Not to mention the pain of downloading, uploading or streaming.

As the cloud infrastructure leader, Amazon’s announcement signifies the end of local based storage and the escalation of Metcalfe’s law on bandwidth.  A decade ago Larry Ellison compared computing and storage to the water or electric company — that is, you should just turn it on and it should work.  You don’t need a water tank or electric plant at your home to have access to all the water and electricity you need.  While the NC (network computer) vision of Oracle was about a decade early – it was spot on and is now here…..

If all your music and other large files are now ready for the cloud (a la Amazon or DropBox or others), we are at the beginning of the next phase of the Internet and will soon see the wholesale shift of commercial content from captive CMS’s to the cloud based infrastructure similar to what we have built at Vertical Acuity.  From there it is a short hop to Content Logistics or the re-invention of how content is discovered and consumed.  Thats our bet anyway.