History Matters

A fascinating article in Technology Review highlights and quantifies a problem that is also an opportunity: disappearing data.

The article reports on the findings of a new research study of social media that finds that in an analysis of recent major cultural events (e.g. Arab Spring), 11% of the social media content had disappeared within a year and 27% within 2 years. Beyond that, the study authors have calculated that the world loses 0.02% of its culturally significant social media material every day.

Keep in mind that what the study authors are measuring is not the number of tweets that are disappearing, but the web pages that these tweets are linking to.

And while this study only looked at headline news events, you've probably had experiences similar to mine: links to news stories and press releases that are no longer active, businesses removing all traces of failed product launches from their websites, online stories that are undated and thus difficult to rely on, news outlets that continue to treat yesterday's news like yesterday's news - and the list goes on.

The short message is that historical knowledge is always valuable, and it becomes even more valuable as it becomes less available. And that's what we are seeing online. Whether by accident or design, more and more content is "aging off" the web, creating opportunities for those companies that hold onto it in an organized fashion.

Yes, there are amazing resources like The Internet Archive that attempt to maintain searchable, historical copies of the entire web, but as you might suspect, this is hard, and there is a limit to the amount of detail it can store. But taking on this task on a vertical market basis is do-able, and potentially quite remunerative.

Many data products are designed to provide the latest and most current data, and that's smart. But as you add new data, don't delete the old data. It's amazing what insights can be gleaned by watching the changes to a business over time, and as the art of data analytics evolves, this capability will only get more compelling. But you can't analyze data you don't have. More than a few data companies I know owe their strength and their profitability to the fact that they maintained historical data. And as you become the sole source for content that has disappeared elsewhere from the web, you create a proprietary aspect to your content, along with an often insurmountable competitive barrier.

So take a little time to think about what information (specific data points or full-text documents) you can preserve, and how valuable this information might become if it wasn't available anywhere else, because that's the trend I see. What's past isn't just prologue; it may also be a new profit center!

The Strategic Use of APIs

Looking for change, challenge, growth? Increased innovation across your organization? New content models and revenue? A new audience acquisition strategy? The ability to knock out the competition? Then think about giving third party developers to access to your content and data in a structured and open manner via APIs -- Application Programming Interfaces. APIs represent a way for publishers to develop new sources of revenue by increasing content distribution fueled by technology and bringing outside ideas in.

Consider Twitter and the constellation of products created by third party developers in its orbit. Twitter provides users up-to-the-minute content on a continuous basis and generates ad revenue through sales of promoted tweets. Twitter is a relate-able and familiar model to publishers.

By allowing third party developers access to its content, Twitter invited innovation from the outside in, increasing the use and value of its content and boosting its revenue. Third party development using Twitter’s API makes Twitter even more useful and draws a larger user-base to its content. Twitter’s ongoing evolution holds valuable lessons for those producing and distributing content.

Innovation, Increased Data Use, Expanding Audiences - APIs provide external talent the ability to develop novel useful new pathways to your content which increases data use and revenue and helps companies innovate and evolve past its competition. Providing access to content and data in a structured and open manner for third party development provides the opportunity to design entirely new ways for existing customers as well as new customers to experience content.

Successful publishers understand the importance of aligning content to the capabilities new technologies bring. It’s a tough job since publishing as an industry has traditionally under-valued and under-funded R&D and struggles with accepting external ideas. APIs represent the next step in developing new ways of presenting and pricing content as well as meeting the expectations of an audience which is constantly growing in technological sophistication.

Monetizing APIs, Controlling Access to and Pricing Content -APIs offer endless possibilities to monetize content which are limited only by the imagination of app developers. Technology exists for controlling the access to and securing content as well as the tools necessary for monetizing it.

Old-timey revenue and pricing models publishers are already familiar with: ad-supported, transactional and subscription as well as somewhat newer models like DaaS (Data-as-a-Service) can be implemented in conjunction with systems for tracking and billing for data usage.

APIs and Expectations - Across industries and businesses APIs are redefining how companies develop their products and conduct business and the steadily escalating growth of APIs will influence and shape expectations about how content is accessed, used and priced.

-- Nancy Ciliberti

Google: Free Here; Paid There

Google may be a lot of things, but it's certainly not boring. Just this week in fact, it did several interesting revenue model back-flips, changing one product to free and making another one paid.

Let's start with Zagat. Zagat sells its content, in print and online. Not a revenue model Google knows anything about, but that didn't stop Google from snatching up Zagat for around $150 million in 2011. I predicted at the time that Google would make Zagat content free and dump in into Google Places (home of its user-generated business reviews). What happened? Google announced this week that it will make Zagat content free and dump it into Google Places. Google Places, in turn, will be dumped into Google Plus, as part of an initiative to shore up Google's faltering response to Facebook.

Google hasn't thrown away all of Zagat's revenue, at least not yet. You'll still be able to buy the print Zagat guides. Google will still charge for the Zagat iPad app. And my suspicion is that Zagat's real source of profit, gift copies of the guides imprinted with corporate logos, will continue. Make sense? If so, click here.

The biggest question for me is what happens when you mix Zagat's edited, witty, curated reviews with a much larger grab-bag of user generated reviews? Will Zagat reviews shine, or get lost in the sauce? Will people continue to submit reviews to Zagat when they can get immediate gratification (and reach the same audience) with a user-generated review? Sure, the Zagat brand is strong, but Google is sailing into uncharted waters, and I am not sensing a strong hand on the tiller.

This very same week, Google decided to rebrand its Google Product Search service as Google Shopping. And with the new name, Google decided a revenue model might be cool too. So the new Google Shopping service will be paid inclusion. Yes, Google Shopping is now a buying guide.

Charging for inclusion in the product directory (Google daintily calls this "a commercial relationship with merchants") is apparently the first time a Google-created service has gone from free to paid. Also, as you read Google's rationale for this shift, you realize that it has spent a lot of time and money to learn some basic truths about data publishing, for example:

• Even companies that do make the effort to submit product information in structured format are lousy about keeping their information current
• A smaller database of highly accurate data is more attractive to most users than a larger database of moderately accurate data
• Structured data permits far more powerful and precise searching of product information

So while I have historically been at a loss to figure out what Google is doing, it's getting easier these days as Google moves ever-closer to doing everything, all at once. Just don't try this strategy at home!