To save the publishing industry, stop using the word “Content”
The King is dead. Long live the King?
What does a business do when customers don’t want to pay for your product? It tries selling the product to different customers and/or making a different product. Not so easy if you’re a publisher. You make one thing: “content.” What do you do then?
Of course, that’s the best thing you can do — after all, Content is King, right? Yes, content is king. People will always want content to consume and share. But specific content is a different story.
The problem with content
The word “content” implies that we’re talking about a commodity that you’re selling through controlled distribution channels. You could say people want content like people want fruits and vegetables. That’s all fine and dandy, but deciding to sell bananas when everyone else is selling bananas means you have no pricing power — people will buy wherever they can get it the cheapest. Let’s make things worse by saying your competition can sell an infinite number of bananas at no additional cost. Oh, and some of them are willing to work for free. That’s right, customers aren’t willing to pay for anything that they can get for free.
Ok, so you say “Fine, I’ll buy a produce store and sell all kinds of fruits and vegetables. That way people can get everything under one roof. I’ll make money by saving people time.” Of course, you then find that people are getting bombarded by free fruit and vegetable offers being delivered right to their front door (yes, this is my attempt to classify social media).
You could decide to buy up all of your competitors. But people are popping up all over the place with infinite bananas made right at home for free (those damn bloggers!).
There are some circumstances where you can still have a business: if people really only trust your bananas (New York Times bananas) or they feel like they will miss trusted bananas amongst the flood of free fruits and vegetables (Wall Street Journal market news … bananas). Some can be successful by having better/different fruit or working outside of aggregation. Most cannot.
(*The analogy makes the most sense when talking about subscribers, but it’s still very applicable when talking about advertisers by substituting the word “free” with “nearly free” for the cost of the ad inventory bananas.)
Getting out of the fruit business
What if publishers took a step back and started viewing their business not as content business, but as a problem-solving business? How can they solve the problems of their customers (visitors, subscribers, advertisers) by fulfilling their unmet needs?
…others may find they’re in the what can I do for myself to feel healthier and more attractive business.
Getting a better understanding of what those problems are can be a good first step. Someone in the banana business may find that actually they’re in the what to have for breakfast business. Others may find they’re in the potassium delivery business. Yet others may find they’re in the what can I do for myself to feel healthier and more attractive business.
If TechCrunch thought the problems they were solving were people wanting tech news, maybe they wouldn’t have created TechCrunch Disrupt events. But somehow they realized that what they do is help people tap into and participate in the tech industry and they can bring people together to help with that (and make a lot of money from it!).
Other publishers have seen an opportunity to dig deeper into a visitor’s need to understand, and with the arrival of Vox and FiveThirtyEight, “explanatory journalism” came into vogue. Both are great examples of a blend of journalism and technology to create a new product that creates more value. It remains to be seen whether people will pay for their coverage, but it’s a step in the right direction for sure.
Boiling a business down to the essence of the problem they are solving can sometimes clarify new directions to go in. Luxury fashion brands are built partly through associating with celebrities. You see a star wearing Lady St. Petsois JuJu and you want to wear that as well. How did you find out the star was wearing that designer? A fashion magazine.
The question for that fashion magazine may well look like: how could they address the needs of the readers in the best way possible? And how can they do the same for the brands? Maybe an event? Maybe an app that alerts users on what their favorite celebrity has just been spotted wearing? Or when their favorite brands spotted on different celebrities? (I’m not suggesting any of these are the right answer. The answer requires knowing a lot more about the publishing brand, the readers, and the advertiser. In fact, the best ideas are rarely the obvious, easy ones!)
Of course, a fashion magazine is also about a lot more than just pairing a celebrity with a product as well! These other aspects further open doors to new ideas and opportunities.
The wrong way is the right way
Part of the notion of “content” is that its production is repeatable and distribution is scalable — you can assemble an editorial team to crank out “content” and put the “content” anywhere and everywhere. It’s efficient and cheap.
What isn’t obvious is that doing the more expensive and less repeatable thing is what can create a competitive advantage, and therefore the potential for a more sustained differentiated value proposition. (These things could be seen as investments, but not necessarily). Anyone can write and publish an article (although this article was really really hard!). But not anyone can build a statistical model to predict election results like on Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. This model can’t be used for anything aside from elections. But it was the only one cranking out accurate predictions, so everyone was talking about it (sure, not everyone liked the numbers, but that’s a different issue!). Is that statistical model considered “content”? Who cares?! It perfectly addressed the needs of its target market, and you couldn’t get anything like that elsewhere.
Capture the power of uniqueness
In order to de-commoditize, publishers need to start asking themselves “what is so unique about this publication, these readers, and these advertisers that it would only make sense to do it at this publication?” It’s thinking like that which will yield something like FiveThirtyEight’s statistical model. Or TechCrunch Disrupt events. Or making apps. Or GigaOm industry research and consulting.
Even within advertising, the market seems to be bifurcating into commodity and premium inventory, where either a special advertising opportunity exists to demand a price premium (eg Coachella), or suffer at the digital hands of algorithmic ad markets.
Some of the clues to capturing the power of uniqueness can be found from employing innovation methods that entrepreneurs like myself have been using for years: new strategic insights, customer segmentation/needs analysis, and rapid hypothesis and prototype testing.
What about publishing?
Oh, so publishers have a bunch of people really good at making “content” — what happens to them? Well, they could use their expertise to forward these other initiatives. But publishers almost certainly do not need to stop publishing (yay!).
Why is this true? Well, let’s work under the assumption that after going through this innovative process, they may well also learn how to produce content that is more differentiated. Or, maybe they just don’t want anyone else controlling their “content” so they keep making their own. They can keep producing “content” for the same reason that other businesses need content marketing — it’s still a powerful vehicle to drive awareness and engagement. And just because they can’t capture the value their publishing activities creates doesn’t mean it doesn’t create value for their readership.
Publishers have always been very good at getting attention. They just haven’t been as good lately at monetizing it. While in some circumstances, their “content” isn’t necessarily the product they’re selling anymore, it’s not the same thing as saying “stop publishing.” Rather, it’s saying their publishing activities are a crucial part of the marketing funnel, just like most other modern companies. Publishers are just way better at those steps!
So there you have it: publishers should abolish the word “content” to open their eyes to innovation. And if they can’t stop using the word “content,” at least put it quotes around it like I do until we think of a different word.
Consulting: As a media entrepreneur and innovation consultant, I’m happy to talk with you about how to identify new opportunities and build new solutions as this industry goes through the largest transformative challenge it has ever faced.
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