Magazine Publishers of America
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The Harmonie Club * 4 East 60th Street, New York City | 12:00 – 2:00PM
Monday, February 1, 2010
Is 2010 the "Year of Content?" As predictions about the future of content continue to swirl, one thing is clear: the level of change faced by the media industry is creating industry-sized opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship in content.
Join Demand Media's Steven Kydd, as he discusses the company's disruptive model for creating and publishing high quality, original content - for profit and with purpose.
Learn how Demand Media's innovative approach is harnessing the changing economics of content, and how magazines are poised to profit from this breakthrough model.
*Complimentary for the first 100 MPA Publishing/ASME Members; $75 for MPA members; $125 for nonmembers. Space is limited; register early.
Past Meet the Innovator Speakers
Meet the Innovator: Jim Brock, May 1, 2007Publishers Hear Digital Fingerprinting Pitch
Watching Google and Viacom duke it out in court is interesting, but in the real world, publishers and other site owners are more interested in finding a practical way to monitor who's using their content and either get some reimbursement or get it off the Web.
As the business world read about Google/YouTube filing for a dismissal of Viacom's $1 billion copyright infringement suit earlier this week, a group of publishing executives gathered at a Magazine Publishers of America "Meet the Innovators" session to hear a pitch for one potential answer.
Attributor Corp., a privately held Redwood City, CA company started by Silicon Valley executives, is testing technology that scans and captures digital "fingerprints"--or identifying characteristics--of text, images and audiovisual content and then continuously scans its index of the Web to pick up matches.
The company claims that the system can spot content reuse within just about any Web area/format, including RSS feeds, self-published sites, social networks, advertising networks, search engines and aggregators, based on a few text sentences, bits of an image, or seconds of an audio/video clip.
Attributor doesn't claim to know exactly what is and is not "fair use" under the evolving legal precedents surrounding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; rather, the system employs a site owner's own specified criteria to generate automatic responses to identified instances of reuse, explained CEO Jim Brock, a former Yahoo copyright counsel who co-founded Attributor in 2005 with Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jim Pitkow.
Depending on the scenario (the percentage of content used, whether it's being used for commercial purposes, etc.), a content reuser might, for instance, receive a request to remove content, or a proposal to allow continuing reuse of the content in return for giving the originator a portion of advertising revenue or licensing fees. A single console provides the site owner with ongoing monitoring of each issue's status until there is some kind of resolution.
Site owners can also employ a searchable public registry that allows anyone wishing to republish content to identify the owner and seek a licensing agreement.
In short, Attributor may present a more streamlined and wide-ranging solution than existing content monitoring systems like Indigo Stream Technologies' Copyscape, which relies on Google's search engine to seek out unauthorized uses.
Attributor is now in beta with several "large, international publishers," and is taking requests to generate free trial reports for interested publishers while the development phase continues, Brock said. Between 40 and 45 million Web pages per day are being added to the system through RSS feeds and periodic content scanning/conversions, he added.
In December, the company announced that it had received $10 million in funding to date from investors including Sigma Partners, Draper Richards LP, First Round Capital, Amicus and Selby Venture Partners.
Where does Brock think digital fair use definitions are headed? "At this point, nobody can say that a certain percentage of an article equates or does not equate to fair use," he says. "It's still subjective under the law. But once we have the systems in place for transparency, we believe those standards will evolve."
Meanwhile, he says, "if from a business standpoint, it's not fair use by your standards, you can address that, negotiate, respond as you see fit." For example, if no attribution is provided, a significant portion of a given piece of content is being used, and it's being used for commercial purposes, "then you've got three indicators that might set off a 'ding, ding, ding,'" Brock notes.
Meet the Innovator: Peter Meirs, June 6, 2006Technologies Shaping Media: Practical, Emerging, and Disruptive
The challenge of keeping up with technology and the increasingly tech savvy consumer base keeps magazine publishers hungry for information. More than 150 magazine executives crowded into New York's Harmonie Club June 6, to hear Time Inc.'s Director of Alternative Media Technologies, Peter Meirs, speak about how technology grows and what tech innovations publishers should be looking for in the near future. It was the second installment in the MPA's continuing “Meet the Innovators” series.
Meirs primary role at Time Inc. is to lead the development of technologies and business models that extend Time Inc.'s content into electronic magazines and other digital media. He is also an affiliate of the MIT Media Lab, which emphasizes technologies that improve quality of life, as well as a founding member of the PRISM
Technology can be broken into three groups, he said: disruptive, emerging, and practical. Disruptive is brand-new technology that is just breaking through. It's unclear if it will last or work. Emerging is when it is almost ready for adoption by the mass culture. Perhaps it still costs too much, is awkward to use, or doesn't scale. Practical technology is when it becomes part of the mainstream and is accepted.
Meirs pointed out that sometimes technology can take a long time to travel through this continuum and that it can float on a sea of hype for some time before it becomes something useable to all. Charge couple devices (CCD), which turned images into data, were invented in 1969 but there was no use for it until six years later when Kodak built the very first digital camera. It was huge and not practical, but it worked.
CCD, Meirs noted, was a crucial part of making the digital camera, which wasn't a widely accepted device until 2002 when digital-camera prices fell below $300. Then people began getting rid of their old cameras and using digital cameras as their sole cameras. Meirs pointed out that digital is quickly replacing most analog devices, such as DVDs instead of videotape or MP3s instead of records. Some digital – such as ebooks – has a long way to go before it replaces its predecessor.
Digital magazines fall into the latter category, said Meirs, but are much more viable at this point than ebooks. Digital editions have now existed for a number of years and once were thought to spell the eventual end of print editions. While that prediction may never come to fruition, digital editions are fast becoming a part of the overall picture for publishers. Companies such as Zinio, Olive, and Nextbook continue to crank out digital editions for publishers, but Meirs stated that there are far more innovative ways to use digital editions than the current offerings. He mentioned a company based in Norway called Magwerks that integrates moving images, sound, and extensive interactivity into every page of its digital editions.
Time Inc. put out a special digital edition for its Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue that featured slide shows, sound and the ability to remove text from a page if so desired. "Design-centric formats really aid reader retention" in digital, he said.
One thing that may help digital editions thrive is the creation of flexible electronic paper or virtual displays, which Meirs estimated could be a practical technology in the next three to five years. There are currently a few versions being beta tested. This flexible electronic paper would give the consumer more interactivity with the publication and retain the feel of looking through a magazine.
Meirs highly recommends publishers adopt
The near future of the web, Meirs said, is about connecting, collaborating and engagement. This includes such things as blogs and RSS, and it's emerging quickly. Within six months it will be practical. Websites Meirs offered as examples are Flickr, which posts user-created images that other users can view and organize extensively; YouTube, a similar site for video posting; and Technorati, which searches blogs for information you seek. "Everyone is collecting content and organizing it endlessly," said Meirs.
Meirs also mentioned Craigslist, Topix.net, Wikipedia and Pandora, where users can create their own radio station based on an individual's musical interests, as sites worth studying to witness the evolution of the consumer web experience. "Consumers are looking more and more to be engaged. We need to make platforms for that. Very soon this will be expected from us."
In Meirs' question-and-answer session, he said that he had no real idea on how to monetize mobile technology, and that he's not quite sure how publishers should use it. Personally, he's used AvantGo for years, but he knows that others aren't happy reading on small screens or needing to download content. He also noted that current digital-magazine vendors aren't changing with the times and aren't providing a way for consumers to get to the material without having to download software. "I don't want my reader to have to download something," he said.
One questioner mentioned that television advertising is becoming more and more irrelevant as TIVO and other digital video recorders allow consumers to delete commercials. When Meirs was asked if this meant the eventual elimination of magazine ads in digital formats, he replied that the crush on television ads was a real opportunity for magazine publishers. "This is forcing media buyers to consider magazine advertising," he said. "Television is at great risk."
He dismissed the notion of an earlier era that digital editions would replace print editions. "But they're great for sampling," he said. Special bonus copies could be sent digitally, perhaps immediately upon a consumer ordering a subscription online so he or she doesn't have to wait an eternity for the first print edition. Regarding digital editions: “Responses line up on age not gender," he said. Younger consumers are more likely to check out the digital editions.
At the close of Meirs talk, MPA President & CEO Nina Link encouraged the crowd to not only identify the innovators within their own companies but to encourage innovation within the organization.
Meet the Innovator: Rishad Tobaccowala, March 9, 2006Embrace Digital and Analog Biz Models, Urges TobaccowalaFor the debut of the new MPA series “Meet the Innovators,” Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of DeNuo, urged publishers to embrace digital and analog business models. Speaking before more than 100 magazine executives at the Harmonie Club in Manhattan, on March 9, 2006, Tobaccowala also presented an optimistic vision for the future of the magazine industry.
“There is no ‘or’ anymore,” he said. “It’s this ‘and’ that. You can’t run one model. It’s digital and analog.”
He went on to add, “I believe consumer magazines are better positioned for the future than any industry. You are not in the publishing business or print business. You are in the content business and the consumer understanding business. You did it previously with print.”
His bullish outlook stemmed from his strong belief in professionally edited content which results in a quality product, and the relevance of that content. Tobaccowala stressed that there was simply too much noise in the media marketplace.
“There are 30 million blogs,” he said. “And 25 million are just therapy.”
Although Tobaccowala pushed publishers to embrace video content on their digital platforms, he also advised them to move cautiously into new digital initiatives like podcasts or blogs. “We’re not in the business to do cool new things,” he said. “This is about making money.”
Tobaccowala spent several minutes discussing Google’s large footprint in the media business. He suggested that although the company would continue to be important, it would not dominate. “They are growing so fast, they don’t know what they’re doing,” he said. “They don’t understand brands.”
He also said the future would be shaped by companies he termed “slime,” meaning companies that most people in the audience had never heard of. “I spend most of my time with slime,” he noted.
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