To accompany this article a series of interviews were recorded with such business leaders as New models
Demand Media: Publish-to-get-paid
Richard Rosenblatt transformed MySpace from a little-known website to one of the most visited places on the web. Here he talks about his new, 3i-backed venture, Demand Media.
‘We’re moving into publish-to-get-paid. Put an article or video on one of our sites and our system tracks how much that piece of content is worth and pays a percentage to you. It’s the next step from MySpace – going from free publishing of content to content that is targeted and paid-for.
‘What gets everyone so excited is that we can predict, on average, what an article’s worth before we even publish it. We use proprietary technology that we’ve built based on our experience of search, domains and ads.
‘We generate titles we know will be popular, provide platforms for users to create those titles (http://www.ehow.com/ for text and http://www.expertvillage.com/ for video) and offer distribution through our 50-plus websites and 1.5 million domains.
‘I formed Demand Media because I saw this coming. The company is all about empowering the next generation of creators to produce more content. That benefits us and it benefits them.’
ITV: Deepening audience involvement
Hugely-popular UK soap opera Emmerdale celebrated Christmas Day 2006 with the murder of patriarch Tom King. This didn’t just pull in high viewing figures on the day – it also enabled ITV to learn a lot more about its audience.
Viewers flocked to the website to assist in solving the crime. 120,000 people registered in the first week alone, each of them providing ITV with a significant amount of personal information – now used to help target highly-relevant content and advertising.
In the view of Jeff Henry, who’s headed ITV’s Consumer Division since 2005: ‘That deeper involvement from our audiences is clearly an essential part of what we have to do.
‘We also see that in our Friends Reunited database, which has 15 million entries – again, information that people have freely given.
‘This is about people’s entertainment, their enjoyment. As long as we make sure that there is relevance for them, they’re happy to share their data.’
Reed Business: Trusted B2B brands
Peter de Monnink is the Chief Strategy and Internet Officer for Reed Business, one of the four divisions within Anglo-Dutch publishing giant Reed Elsevier. He focuses on the value of longstanding, highly-trusted brands in the B2B sector, illustrated by the rise of user-generated content in the UK farming community.
‘In Farmers Weekly Interactive, which is the prominent website for farmers in the UK, we see strong audience participation. They discuss when to harvest their crops and what the weather will be. People actually take business decisions based on what people in their region say. As you can imagine, that is extremely valuable.
‘A brand is a set of associations, and it’s very difficult to build a set of associations around a community. That is where powerful B2B print brands have been successful for the last 100 years and it’s a big advantage when gaining access to a community and encouraging them to produce online content.’
Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! Answers is one of the fastest-growing social communities in Europe, providing a forum for people to post and answer questions, ranging from the practical (“How do you care for a Venus Flytrap?”) to the obscure (“Why do dogs bury bones?”).
As the vice president of search and social media for Yahoo! Europe, Jeffrey Revoy, was responsible for launching the service – which not only satisfies users’ curiosity but is also providing new opportunities to advertisers:
‘Yahoo! Answers is different to Wikipedia, which is very much about facts and figures. Yahoo! Answers has elements of that but it’s also about tapping into people’s experience. You may have a passion around cooking but it’s not necessarily something you can contribute to Wikipedia, because you can’t cite three references for your favourite recipe.
‘We're thinking about how we can encourage advertisers to contribute to Yahoo! Answers in much the same way as an individual user - whilst making it very clear that the answers are coming from a company. This will help in the delivery of high-quality content and create a much more participatory way for advertisers to get involved.’