Here is an excerpt from a proprietary research report from eMarketer that estimates “US user-generated content sites will earn $4.3 billion in ad revenues in 2011, up from $1 billion in 2007. ” The participation numbers strike me as high but there you have it.
It’s self-serving and non-scientific but the finding of this survey make sense: “IT decision-makers . . . are joining peer-driven communities and participating in user-generated content to help in the decision process.”
That’s the gist of a survey by the social-networking firm ITtoolbox.com. According to a press release the 15-question survey was distributed to 400,000 IT professionals in May. About 2,000 responded.
The top-10 findings are available in PDF format. Even discounting for self-interest it makes sense that people responsible for large-ticket purchases will seek out the kudos and caveats of their peers.
The lesson for B2B publishers or wannabes is clear — add social media mechanisms or perish.
I noticed this string of reports when I scanned Paid Content this morning:
“Opening the window” is the Wall Street slang that refers to those rare periods when the investment bankers who sell new companies sense that institutional investors — pension, mutual and hedge fund managers — have the stomach to buy stock in new firm. I haven’t tracked IPOs in a while but this little rush of activity made me wonder if the window had opened.
When Andy Plesser, a PR veteran, interviewed Rafat Ali in January about whether another Internet bubble may be building, Ali said there was a lot of “foolish money” out there to invest in media and video companies.
If only this foolish money would find MiniMediaGuy! Alas, that hot cash is simply silly, not lost. At least not yet 🙂
In the overlooked but noteworthy category, blogger J.D. Lasica, cofounder of the grassroots site OurMedia.org, has gotten a $15,000 Knight News Challenge grant to spend the next year writing about and disseminating elements of a “community media toolset: easy-to-use social media tools (plug-ins, scripts, guides and tutorials) that can expand public participation on citizen media sites. ” So says Amy Gahran in a Poynter Institute commentary. (Many additional details in Gahran’s piece.)
Lasica has already helped create one of the pioneering grassroots media efforts. OurMedia’s Personal Media Learning Center is already a great starter toolkit. In the coming year I guess he’ll be concentrating on simplification and explanation — how to use them. As he told Gahran:
“the vast majority (of systems) are written by geeks for geeks. We need to get the coders and the public-facing user interface people in the same room and on the same page.”
JD’s personal home page also has a news research & reference link worth bookmarking for ways to find sources or do research.
So there may not be a better tool-finder and organizer in the grassroots media arena. Ironically, however, we are now in the phase of the media evolution in which the creation and publication of material is of far, far less importance than the discovery or re-invention of business models to support grassroots media. Here is my talking point on this issue; as MarketWatch.com recently reported:
“The top 10 online sites on the Web, including the Big Four (Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN) captured 99% of gross ad dollars in 2006, up from 95% in 2005.â€
Without a better distribution of revenues, new media will simply enable more people to raise their voices — but not to support or sustain their efforts except as labors of love. And that strikes me as a recipe for frustration.
Rich Skrenta, who runs the news aggregation site Topix , has written an interesting post (Are network effects getting weaker?) about how “social media” sites may end up being so many passing pads. Here is an excerpt:
“A place might be interesting simply because there are a lot of other people there at the moment. We’re instinctively drawn towards crowds . . . I started wondering if there was less lock-in than I thought on other services supposedly protected by strong network effects. Like eBay, for instance. They’ve got all the buyers, and all the sellers . . . is there an 80/20 rule to (their 700,000) merchants? Could a core be drawn to a new service? Ebay hasn’t updated itself significantly, ever.”
I have no inside information but from what I know of Skrenta and his crew they are not given to idle speculation (an affliction which sadly strikes me and 50 million other bloggers).
Is Topix eyeing local e-commerce? Maybe adding a marketplace to its community talk? Why? Let’s face it: click-thru ads don’t cut it. That’s chump change, There’s gotta be new ways to support the delivery of localized information. At the same time local sites have to be more useful and habitual than the current faddishness implicit on the Web where the next sensation is only a click away.
Topix has already localized info using artificial intelligence that sifts information into buckets by either zip code and/or category (see breakdown here). And people are starting to talk around its forums. Why not offer them something to buy?
Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part. Here is what Skrentra said about Topix in April.
The Supernova conference ends today in San Francisco and though not able to attend I checked in this morning at the weblog to scan a transcript of the panel discussion (Rise of the Videonet) moderated by J.D. Lasica of Ourmedia and found this comment by Mary Hodder, founder of the video tools & community site Dabble:
“Most of remix culture now is parody. The issue is control. People want to be compensated for their contributions. The harder issue is attribution. Do you let someone chop up something and remake it, and thereby assume ownership of it”
A good but answered question, as is the issue of who pays for production. During the same discussion Jeremy Allaire, founder of the Internet TV distribution site Brightcove said:
“The UGC sites aren’t generating meaningful revenue yet. Media are experimenting with video ads.”
What Hodder calls “bottom-up” (as opposed to top-down, studio-generated) video is as starved for revenues as the rest of the original-content generating Internet. As MarketWatch.com recently reported:
“The top 10 online sites on the Web, including the Big Four (Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN) captured 99% of gross ad dollars in 2006, up from 95% in 2005.”
Unless that changes, unless the flow of advertising revenues to online media are more broadly distributed w’ll end up with a future media even more concentrated than the current setup.
Meanwhile on the frontiers of advertising, Michele Gershberg of Reuters has filed this concise and interesting report that posits behavioral advertising as the answer to audience fragmentation — and, I think, as the possible support mechanism for bottom-up media.
“As people now get their entertainment on everything from cell phones to video games, the audience has dispersed from their living rooms. That makes them harder to track down, but offers the advantage of more precise information once they are found . . .Internet advertising agencies . . . figure out where to find a specific audience and build campaigns tailored to the Internet as a medium. ‘This is going to be a Golden Age of advertising,’ said Scott Howe, president of the DRIVEpm behavioral unit of online marketer aQuantive Inc. ‘It’s the ability to deliver messages in sequence and tell a story. Advertising is going to become fun again. It’s going to become serialized.’ “
Trust an ad guy to put a gloss on things. Thanks to Deep Cuz for pointing out this article.
 Some people got to have it . . .
Like the Center for Open Source Radio, which is running a fund drive after rather suddenly losing its core university support. Its appeal says:
“We’re an independent, non-profit production company, and it has been no small challenge to try to replace half a million dollars a year in six months. We’ve made some progress — a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, not least . . . We need your help to keep this community alive.”
Here is an introduction to the group, and a place to go to help.
Some people are giving it away . . .
Like the Knight Brothers Foundation, perhaps the premier philanthropic group in media or at least in the slice thereof that is mutating out of the newspaper industry. The group is gearing up to give away another $5 million through its 21st Century News Challenge and will begin accepting applications July 1. Read an interview with Gary Kebbel, the Knight official in charge of the contest. I have written a half-dozen posts that mention aspects of the contest, and the first entry, The (Good) Knight Challenge makes the essential point about the sort of ideas they want to fund: they are locally oriented and use new technologies to involve the audience. Good luck!
And other people give away less money, but we’d love some anyway . . .
J-Lab.org, a new media instigation and training outfit at the University of Maryland that is itself funded by the Knight Foundation, is giving away smaller grants in the $10,000 to $15,000 range through the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism. That link will take you to the entry rules — deadline is June 13!
