Eileen NaughtonDirector, Media Platforms, Google
Insights from GoogleAmerican Magazine ConferenceOctober 30, 2007Boca Raton, FL
Well it' nice to be back in Boca, and see so many friends in the publishing business.
I've always loved magazines. And I still do. Lots has changed since I chaired this conference in 2004.
Me? I cut my hair, I changed jobs, and I joined what is, for the moment, the most innovative, most-watched company in the Internet economy: Google.
So Ive been invited back to AMC to talk about Google, how Google works with branded content creators, and how magazine brands can participate more fully in the digital marketplace for content and advertising.
I brought along that YouTube montage that preceded me to illustrate just how different participation in the media landscape has become.
It's a whole new reality, folks, and it' fully digital.
We live in a world of video sharing on a massive scale, where social networking has become the norm for communication and self-expression on the webA world of personalization, text messaging and digital chatter on sites with names like Twitter.coma world where user-generated content and branded content coexist, and are fully discoverable, transportable, and available on-demand, all the time.
It's a world where this Tibetan monk carries a cell phone just one of the 3 billion wireless devices in use today. 1.2 billion people are connected to the Internet today, close to half of them on mobile devices. Jupiter Research predicts that by 2011, nearly 2 billion people a third of the worlds population will be online, and 900 million of those connections will be wireless.
Internet adoption has happened faster than any other medium.
This chart shows how many years it took new mediums to reach 50 million users, and $1 billion in ad spending.
The green circles along the blue line show that it took radio 37 years; TV 16 years; Cable six years and the Internet just three years to reach 50 million users.
The green flags show it how long it took to reach $1 bn in ad spending: radio 43 years, 10 for TV, seven for Cable, and again, three years for the Internet.
Things are moving fast.
Internet business models are fluid, and hot new companies are springing up faster than you can say IPO. Tech companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft now sit squarely in the media space. So do services like Spotrunner, FeedBurner and Rhapsody. These newer entrants to the media landscape are, admittedly, quite disruptive to the media status quo thats persisted for decades.
Perhaps most disruptive, for those of us in this room, is that these media interlopers are innovating the way advertising is targeted, delivered, measured, priced and sold. So it' easy to feel a bit un-moored by it all. No pun intended, Ann.
Google likes to make complex things seem simple, so heres a simple fact we find pretty interesting:
85% of people online use Search. Searching online is a core consumer behavior that defines our times. It' instant, it' satisfying, and it is a fundamental activity that is at the very essence of what it is to be human, to be curious.
It's why we have magnifying glasses, binoculars, and the Dewey Decimal System. It' why we have all manner of digital search tools, like GPS devices in our cars, electronic program guides in our set-top boxes, contact lists on our cell phones. And it' why a company like Google has several thousand engineers, many hundreds of thousands of file servers, and millions upon millions of lines of code: to make searching the web fast, to make it easy, and to make it a really, really good experience for users.
Search is the most prevalent behavior on the Web. The numbers are kind of mind-numbing: this year 130 million Americans will conduct more than100 billion search queries. And 60 billion of those queries will be on Google.com something like 5 billion a month, or 200 million queries a day.
So when we look at our search logs as you can, too, using a cool little tool called Google Trends (you can find it at Google.com/trends ) we get insights into what people are interested in. Lots of office productivity has been lost to Google Trends. It' a fun application that lets you look at relative search activity for whatever search terms, timeframes, and geographies you specify. Every marketer should play around with it.
Here, I looked at U.S. search query volumes for two terms: magazines in blue, and blogs, in red.
In early 2004, search activity for magazines was significantly higher than for blogs, but by the end of 2005, more Americans searched for blogs than for magazines.
Hmmmm. Makes sense people have to search online for blogs, but not necessarily so for magazines. Still, it' an interesting trend.
Search volumes are also a good proxy for brand vitality.
Here, I looked at query volume for US Weekly (that steady trend line at the bottom, in blue) and TMZ (the spikey line, in red). And wow. TMZ came out of nowhere in 2006, and is growing like crazy. Youll note that the peak search event on TMZ, marked with the red letter D the chart, was Paris Hiltons release from jailquite a momentous occasion in the world of celebrity gossip.
This made me curious, so I looked at TMZ.com query volume compared to that of the leading celebrity magazine brand, People.com, and you can see that in less than two years, TMZ has captured as much search activity on Google as the 30-something year old People brand.
One could read a lot into this about the prurient interests of consumers seeking real-time celebrity gossip, or the speed with which online brands take hold. Brands do matter on the web.
I looked at search query volume for the terms SI.com and fantasy football.and noted a distinct correlation around the notion of fantasy. Peak search volumes for SI.com just happened to be for searches on SIs swimsuit issue. Surprised? You shouldnt be.
Then I added ESPN search terms, and saw a marked lift in overall search volumes. Why? Well, it makes sense: ESPN is a sports brand that lives in the world of sight, sound and motion it' a stronger television brand than it is a magazine brand. And with high-speed Internet connections at nearly 60 percent penetration in the U.S., ESPN.com is a perfect complement to it's tv programming.
Now: many great terms of art have been coined in magazines my personal favorite is Trophy Wife which Julie Connelly coined in Fortune in 1989. Another is The Long Tail, which, those of us who have studied statistics know, describes a statistical distribution known as a Pareto curve, or your basic 80/20 rule.
In the context of the web, The Long Tail, (a term coined by Chris Anderson in a Wired magazine story in 2004) describes how products with low demand say, less-popular books on Amazon can collectively comprise a market share that rivals or exceeds that of a John Grisham bestseller.
That is, If the distribution channel is big enough. Like,say, the Internet itself.
So I took a look at the top magazine sites on the Web, and saw a long-tail distribution with Forbes, SI and People at the head of the tail apologies to my former colleagues at Time Inc. for omitting CNN/Money, it's a really good site but it's not a pure magazine brand, so didnt make this cut.
We see Time, BusinessWeek and PC Week in what is considered the torso of the long tail;
and brands like EW.com, Rolling Stone, Readers Digest and AARP further out along the tail end of this distribution.
But what if we plot magazine brands along a longer tail of websites? It's an entirely different picture:
the head of the tail is much, much steeper, and it's the province of relatively few sites: Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook.
Compared to head-of-tail sites, with their enormous base of unique users and page views, virtually all magazine brands exist along the long tail of branded content.
So a pretty basic question you should be asking yourselves, and your staffs, is: how can you get in on whats happening at the head of the tail? How can you make your brands, your content, and the ads that go with that content, discoverable online?
Now it also bears noting that three of the six leading sites are social networks.
In no time at all, social networks have come to represent about half of all web traffic.
Which begs another question: what strategies are you using to get your ad-supported content onto social networking sites? Lets look at a few of the more common distribution models.
Most content brands create destination sites like these for Forbes and Better Homes & Gardens and combine content packages with ads and consumer utilities, like subscription management tools, recipe engines, stock tickers, shareware, community chat, whatever.
Forbes has the leading traffic of all magazine sites shown here 7.5 million unique users and 108 million page views. Or about 14 pages per user, each month. Or about three and a half pages per week, or a page every other day. Thats all well and good, but it still doesnt get the scale it takes to make this a sizable online business.
Another working model is to create communities around specific content areas.
The Knot.com is an interesting example of a deep, vertical content site. The Knot launched
10 years ago as a content community with lots of utilities for organizing a wedding: planning tools, calendars, local vendors, service suppliers, gift registries.
Eventually the Knot reverse-engineered into magazine and book publishing and video shorts, so that today it's a multi-media lifestage marketing brand for people who are spending lots of money getting serious about life.
Similarly, Martha Stewart Living.com was always conceived as an extension of the magazine and television assets of MSL Omnimedia. Wenda Millard was here earlier, and Im sure she described the many integrated marketing solutions advertisers can find on Marthas TV show, magazine and website.
Now, I've always liked what Cond Nast does with it's epicurean magazine content: it aggregates material from Gourmet, Bon Appetit and other CN brands into a foodies web brand, Epicurious.com. It programs content seasonally, has a great recipe index, lots of utilities, and like other content communities, offers a highly targeted audience for advertisers.
But there are lots more ways to liberate your content assets.
Give consumers the freedom to choose how they interact with your content. They expect to consume content well beyond the confines of any one site.
They personalize it; share it; carry it with them on multiple devices and search for it in little morsels.
So in addition to building destination sites, or communities of users, content owners should be atomizing their contentMaking it discoverable by search engines, repackaging it with relevant utilities, distributing it in micro-bites, in RSS feeds; embedding it in gadgets and ads that can get uploaded to personalized pages, on Facebook or iGoogle or in widgets on Macs and smart phones.
Lets see how Google can help atomize branded content to make a brands content assets discoverable all the time.Anatomy of a search: Oprah Magazine.
This is pretty basic advice, but the first thing is to be sure search engines can actually find all your brand assets. Dont hide it behind paid walls, dont keep it under lock-down. The blue-shaded area is free promotion, folks.
These are the natural results for the search term, Oprah Magazine. Let people find your brand, your content, when they are searching.
Tag your story archives, photos, video clips, press releases all your brand terms and make them freely available.
The next thing is to buy search terms relevant to your brand, and drive traffic back to your sites, where you should get much higher ad CPMs than youd pay for a search ad. Paid results are in the yellow shaded area.
Googles algorithms are as efficient at targeting relevant ads to search queries as they are at producing relevant search results, so paid search is a very low-risk strategy for building traffic back to your sites.
Google has a pretty straightforward business model: it makes virtually all of it's revenue from advertising. And advertising supports the companys mission of organizing all the worlds information. Basically, Google sell ads so Engineers can build cool stuff.
Googles advertising ecosystem is made up of users, publishers and advertisers in that order. Google reaches consumers when they search the web on Google.com. We also power search results for Amazon, AOL, Earthlink and Ask. We reach consumers when they pursue their passions on our content network, also known as Googles AdSense network hundreds of thousands of web publishers, many of them the great magazine brands here today. And we reach them when they go beyond websites for information like Google Maps, GMail, Google TV. Google Print = 70% of US newspapers.
Glam.com is an AdSense partner, doing interesting things. Glam.com is the leading womens destination on the Web.
It's an advertising mecca Glam.com repackages editorial content, including Hearst magazine content, around upscale brand advertising. Without consulting Hearst editors
CBS is the best practitioner at this art of agnostic, but aggressive, distribution of contentthey have entered into all sorts of deals, on non-exclusive terms. Sort of the let a thousand flowers bloom model. It's really smart
If you have any sort of video asset, including outtakes from photo shoots, how-to videos, promotional videos, brand summits, news coveragewhatever you have, tag it! Put it on YouTubewell host it for free and make it available to a community of more than 56 mm unique users US / 132mm WW who stream hundreds of millions of videos each day.more than every TV network, cable network or social network combined. YT is like a giant focus group
Perhaps most interesting to magazine publishershypersyndicate your content, with targeted ads, to feed readers and email subscribers, which are accessible via PCs, email and wireless devices. FeedBurner is a lot like Googles AdSense network: it targets ads to discrete, relevant content morsels in self-elected feeds. Many of your publications are already in the FeedBurner network, which syndicates 75 million feeds / day; there are close to 600k publishers in FB network.
Gadgets and widgets are the next big thing. They are actually mini mobile websites. They can be anything a creative can think of. They can contain website-like functionality and interactivity. You can embed video, URLs, registration forms, one-click purchase buttons, e-commerce links to Amazon or to an airline reservation site. They can drive traffic back to your core site or to any place it makes sense. Gadgets, or widgets, show up on personalized pages like My Yahoo!, Mac homepages and iGoogle. iGoogle users have uploaded more than 100,000 gadgets to their iGoogle homepages.
Essentially, all your brand assets should live in the information cloud where they are discoverableso they can be portable.so they can recombine
This whole notion of cloud computing where applications that once lived on your PC now live in the Internet cloud, so they can be accessible, portable, sharable, flexible It' very liberating.
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