content

How to monetise in the world of free

Paying for media content through a pay wall seems to be a daft idea. Why pay for stuff that is free elsewhere? That’s not to say people won’t pay for content, look at the success of iTunes and app stores. (Their success is due at least in part to the ease of making payments).

We see challenge. For consumers there’s just too much noise in the Digital Landscape. It’s random, raw, repetitive. And for content providers, in this Digital Land of the Free, where’s the revenue?  So here’s an idea. People won’t pay for most content (why should they? It’s free somewhere else isn’t it?) But they will pay for some content.

Our hypothesis is that there is a market for content that is original, timely, novel, exclusive, unique or has quality and authority… that is relevant to me, the individual. With that in mind, Duncan and I present a model underpinned by a media broker, where content is priced according to its relevance.

(Slides best viewed on full screen so you can actually read the commentary at the bottom of the page!)

View more presentations from marc mcneill.
Pillars of a compelling experience

Pillars of a compelling experience

This is a model I often see in organisations when it comes to their web presence.  A product owner comes up with a commercial proposition, marketing work up the content, IT build the functionality and it is goes live.  With this model, no-one actually owns the customer experience.

Worse, this little temple model is repeated across different commercial propositions so you end up with something that is not very joined up.  I’ve blogged about this lack of joined up thinking before.

Now let’s construct a model where the roof of the temple is a compelling customer experience.

What are the ingredients of this new temple model?  It is still going to be founded upon commercial propositions, but they are going to be overlaid by a culture of test and learn.  That is a willingness and ability to experiment; to realise that what you have developed is never final and is always evolving.  It is about taking the learnings of experiments to inform and improve the experience, or to rapidly refine or kill propositions that just do not work.

Then we have the five pillars.  I describe these in a paper I wrote ages back (pdf here, google books here).

Unfortunately these pillars tend to sit within organisational silos; content and personality are ‘owned’ by  marketing, functionality by IT, and operational excellence (that’s all about fulfilling on the customer promise and beyond) is a mixture of IT and operations.  Usability is a ‘funny one’ in that might sit alone, sit in marketing or sit in IT.  But ultimately it is best placed to direct the horizonal filter of Quality Control.  Quality control is not an additional layer of bureaucracy, rather a cultural component that all the pillars feed into.  It is about ensuring consistency and meaningfulness of the experience.  It is about balancing the commercial needs of the product, with the marketing needs of the message and the delivery capability of IT.

Photo credit: K. Dafalias

Does content need a home?

We like to classify things, put them in homes. Information Architects design controlled vocabularies and taxonomies; ultimately labeling where things should go. Things may live in more than one place; we may use a faceted classification, but essentially that is a roadmap to the same unique, indivisible place. On the web this typically means an unintelligible URL with lots of random characters rather than something that is human readable. And that is just not nice. So you want a Robbie Williams CD (not that I’m sure why you’d want such a thing) – your journey may take you down any route:

Adult contemporary > Male Vocalists
Popular artists > Q-T
Pop > Dance Pop
British acts > Male Vocalists
Award winners > Brits > 2005

Whatever the route, chances are they’ll take you to the same page; “robbiewilliams.htm” with a unique URL (more likely than not it will be a dogs dinner of characters and symbols thrown up by the content management system).

The drawback of each journey terminating at the same place is that it lacks context. For example, a music store might have a campaign around specific artists. They may choose a different flavour to the branding in the campaign, a different look and feel. The “Brits” pages are different to the “Dance pop” pages. But as soon as the user is directed to a specific record they will served up the standard artist page. Any context of the journey in a breadcrumb will be lost (or in Amazon repeated to show where the product “lives” according to the different classification hierarchies).

Yet what if the product’s classification was truly faceted, was not indivisible, but lived wherever it was sought? Should the URL of “Robbie Williams” not be how the user has found it, the URL becoming the breadcrumb?

store.com/popular artists/Q-T/robbie.htm
store.com/britishacts/solo/male/robbie.htm
store.com/awardwinners/brits/robbie.htm
Store.com/search/robbie.htm
store.com/tags/robbie/robbie.htm

The page may be (almost) the same, served up (mashed /meshed up) with the context in which it was sought. Related links would be specific to the URL rather than generic (other Brits awards winner in the Brits context, other male vocalists in that context). Yes, there maybe multiple versions of the same page on the site, but from a findability perspective this is little different to a conventional faceted classification system.

OK, this is all well and good, but doesn’t it hinder search engine optimisation? Well no, Google handles duplicate content quite nicely thank you very much. So bring on the tidy URLs and content living nowhere and everywhere.