Content Monetization And Social Media: Marketing Partners Or Distribution Enemies?

Monetization and business opportunities for online content publishers are increasing and opening up new alternative ways to do well in the online professional web publishing space. Unfortunately, most publishers, bloggers, and now even my favorite content business analyst, John Blossom, see things from a rather limited and too restrictive viewpoint. In their eyes, unfair redistribution of content, feed scraping and little innovation in business model connected to online content is penalizing many a blogger and choking their hopes for long-term sustainability. But is John and the others really right?

Photo credit: Mtrommer

Let's look at the two sides of this story: the one being served by expert content analyst and many a bloggers out there as well as my own, dictated by personal observation, experience and trying to see a bit beyond the surface of things.

Here's mine:

a) Keeping on wanting to monetize with traditional mass media advertising approaches the world of social media is a futile attempt by definition. Social media are about conversations, trust and credibility. How can traditional advertising have a hope to have traction in an environment where word of mouth reigns and corporate advertising is often looked down as a "fake" way to communicate?

b) Contextual advertising like Google AdSense works only for large sites? Come on... this story is true only among those who having tried AdSense without having fully understood how to best use it charge AdSense with responsibilities it never had. AdSense and other contextual advertising programs can and do bring in significant revenues for many small publishers, who need not at all to be another Techcrunch to be able to start paying their bills with their focused, niche targeted content.

c) Aggregation and unauthorized content republication by others kills bloggers and web publishers? I don't think so. Yeah, nobody likes to have content republished elsewhere without official permission but haven't we been preaching for the longest time that content needs to flow anywhere it wants to? And now that it does we complain that others are taking advantage of it? Come on... Redistribution, syndication, and re-publishing of content by social media can also be seen a great opportunity to really get a greater reach and visibility while bringing more readers home. It is how that content is written, set-up, linked and protected that determines what others will do with it. Starting to be in control of the redistribution way by customizing some of your content around this can be more beneficial than fighting it.

d) In general there is little to be found in most standard weblogging packages that help a publisher to capitalize on the value of their content in contexts other than their native Web site. I wouldn't wait for publishing tools to resolve this one. It is up to individual online publishers to start thinking with their own head and to start leveraging the many other opportunities available to them besides the standard contextual advertising packages: direct advertising, sponsorship, premium content, merchandising, and in particular events are emerging as wonderful money-making opportunities for those targeting very specific audience interests.

e) Gated communities and protection of content can be powerful tools in the hands of online publishers but they need to be integrated inside innovative approaches to content monetization, which all start from the generous sharing and giving away of highly valuable information to first build credibility, authority and motivation to learn and ask for more, even at the price of one's own email. It is not protecting your content like a Doberman that will help make more money online.

f) Social media presents vast opportunities for creating new relevant occasions for business as well as new ways to monetize the ability to bring strong and passionate community of interest together. Where we may be stretching reality beyond reason, is in our effort to make social media do something they were never supposed to be in the first place and pushing way too hard for integrating traditional money-making schemes. You can't build a party-house and then pretend there something wrong because people don't read your ads, or don't buy from your cart the great soaps you have got to sell. Your party-goers never came to be sold, promoted or marketed to: they came to socialize, to know other like-minded people that have their same interest, to share the interesting things they have discovered in their lives. Ride this fundamental paradigm and you will see different models and opportunities to share and redistribute content inside social media in a relevant, and economically sound approach.

This is how I see it.

Here the other side and all of the motives behind it, presented by Shore's John Blossom.

Photo credit: Stanely Hong

Bloggers Worry About Content Commoditization and Unlicensed Use - Welcome to the Club!

by John Blossom

Read/Write Web notes a hue and cry rising up from bloggers who are concerned about their content being appropriated by aggregation services such as Shyfter that take blog feeds and develop ad-based services using their content without bloggers' approval.

Bloggers are apparently concerned that aggregation services are stripping off revenues from their ad-supported services.

I suppose that there's more than one publisher chuckling on the sidelines of this affair as bloggers by the bucketful begin to discover an uncomfortable fact - if you decide to be a publisher via social media there's no magic spell that removes one from the problems that all publishers have.

Commoditization, unfair use and redistribution of content without verifying a publisher's rights in a new context - these are common complaints in the publishing industry as a whole. This is, unfortunately, where many social media platform providers have fallen short.

Quick to create new features to embed content and to distribute it, many social media platforms have fallen short in their ability to help people monetize their content effectively.

Contextual Ads Are Good Only For Large Sites

Yes, we've had contextual ads on blogs for years, but in essence contextual ads are telling bloggers and other social media creators using them that there's enough demand to sustain their publication on mass media ads. Unfortunately this is rarely the case - the supply of social media content is vastly greater than the demand for media-scaled ads and programs such as AdSense, while beneficial, will not pay huge dividends for most bloggers.

It takes blogs with large, media-scaled audiences such as TechCrunch to sustain business with the existing advertising tools.

The irony here is that as some social media properties have grown to such proportions they are recognizing that they really have the same problems as any other mass media-oriented property.

Aggregation without licensing for commercial purposes draws off a blogger's revenues as much as it does a major newspaper's revenues.

Alternative Solutions

In Content Nation the problems of traditional publishers have become the problems of social media publishers, and vice versa.

Companies such as Newstex help bloggers to benefit from companies who want to play by copyright rules and license social media content, but in general there is little to be found in most standard weblogging packages that help a publisher to capitalize on the value of their content in contexts other than their native Web site.

Some of the solution is better standard features for bloggers - technology such as Attributor can enable a publisher to track content usage more easily and relicensing services such as Copyright Clearance Center's RightsLink and iCopyright can help companies to manage content relicensing opportunities more effectively.

And on Near-Time, the platform that we use for Content Nation, there is the capability to define subscription access to content, a "gated community" that sets a bar for both content access and creation as desired.

These types of tools are the basic "block and tackle" for any online publisher today, whether in social media or mainstream media, to ensure that they understand who is using their content and making it easy to establish good commercial relationships with those valuing content to make money through content aggregation or reuse.

Other Ways To Extract Value From The Social Media Relationship

Unfortunately the technology for social media ads and licensing is really only addressing one part of extracting value from social media.

Individuals such as myself build value for focused audiences that gets converted into marketable value other ways - through consulting engagements, through the sale of research and other services that we provide.

Other people look for more broad social transactions, building a reputation and relationships that can be converted into personal or professional brand value on any number of conversational and tribal levels.

Be it positioning yourself for your next job or promotion, fostering a willingness to participate in events and projects, giving or receiving endorsements or just being tapped into the things that you really love, social media creates value in ways that advertising and licensing don't begin to encompass.

Conclusions

What's really needed to help make social media more successful are better tools to extract value out of social relationships when one's content travels into contexts away from their own home base for their social media.

For example, when my blog is picked up in a feed reader, I'd sure like it if there were an easier way for me to embed offers from other people in my social networks that were valuable to them as well as to me. Some of these might be monetizable, others more purely social, but it's the weak point for most ad networks - they assume that transactions have to be based on mass marketing rather than personal marketing.

This is one of the reasons why marketing events, services and publications via Facebook is becoming increasingly popular - the groups and people who congregate there are explicitly opting in to relationship networks, making marketing on any level far more effective when done as a member of the community.

So my condolences to bloggers who are burning out as their dreams of big-media glory come face to face with the true nature of electronic content.

If you came to glory because you were glad to have free distribution and never demanded any better of your social media platform providers, then shame on you.

But as important as it is to have better tools for commercialization through aggregation and reuse it's more important to think about the basics of how to create value in social media.

Where do you stand?

Original article written by John Blossom for Shore and first published on April 15th 2008 as "Bloggers Worry About Content Commoditization and Unlicensed Use - Welcome to the Club!"