Interesting web tools and services for publishers

I've been collecting a number of websites that offer services that may be of interest to many publishers.  Many of them have to do with elearning and video/webcasting.  Are there other resources like these you can suggest?


www.Articulate.com -- tools to facilitate elearning creation including flash tools

www.Lynda.com -- online training courses (not a tool, but a way a subscription site to sell training videos)

www.SonicFoundry.com -- provides webcasting for events and video capture platform for lectures and training programs

www.Qumu.com -- video communications and webcasting services

www.Issuu.com -- a tool for creating digital publications, free and pro versions available

www.BillMeLater.com -- a payment service, along the lines of PayPal, that may simplify the purchasing experience

www.MailTester.com -- a tool to check the validity of email addresses

Washington Post article: bloggers vs. fair use

Rob Lawson, via Barb Kaplowitz, noted this article from the Washington Post about what’s fair use and what’s misappropriation.  I think there’s going to be a growing recognition that while the newspapers may have lost the classified ads, help wanted, and automotive sections due to complacency, the public has an interest in not letting the journalism be stolen and the need for protection is at least as great as the need for protection for music, movies, and other artistic endeavors.  

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/31/AR2009073102476.html?nav=most_emailed&sid=ST2009073103389

Stay tuned.  We will surely hear more about this issue.

What do you think?

Bloggers is us

In recent years I have had a number of occasions to talk with SIPA board member Don Nicholas of Mequoda Group about bloggers.  We share the view that bloggers look an awful lot like the kitchen-table newsletter publishers who founded this organization over 30 years ago -- if they had the necessary technology available, I have no doubt they would have been blogging too.  So, it came as no surprise to receive an email from Don’s colleague, Amanda MacArthur about blogging which included the following:

Quite honestly, traditional publishers have a lot to learn from the "newbie bloggers". Bloggers often require a team of only one to produce daily content, weekly podcasts, and popular e-books.

Moral of the story: Stop taking yourself so seriously. Create an online home for your publication that doesn't live by the rules of print. Grow an online community that may never have, and possibly never will interact with your print products. Create new products for your new audience and deliver your content on the platforms that your new audience wants.

Good advice. 

Publishing in the FREE world

If nothing else, Chris Anderson's book is certainly stirring up some interesting thinking.  (By the way, you can read Free!  The Future of a Radical Price for free.)

In his New Yorker article ("Priced to Sell; Is Free the future?", July 6, 2009) Malcolm Gladwell is right.  Information doesn't actually want to be free, and in fact can't be.  He cites a number of examples:.  He notes the Dallas Morning News' concern about Amazon/Kindle claiming 70% of the subscription fee, not leaving enough for the content.  He then goes on to say electric power can't be free because of the cost of the transmission lines.  He notes that free TV is suffering but cable TV is doing well.  But Gladwell fails to note an important point – these are all examples of the distributor reaping the value, not the content provider.  His example of YouTube having to license commercial video to drive revenue is one example in favor of the content provider, but only one. 

The implications of the iPhone, iPhone apps, and iTunes are still unclear to me – I'm not sure whether they indicate power to the distribution network or just the power of fads and cool technology. What is clear to me about the Apple experience is that many content providers are finding a way to make iStore work for them, even if it isn't their first choice, and it isn't as profitable as it used to be.

The other piece I read recently on this subject is an article from InfoCommerce Group.  It included the following paragraph:

To thrive in the digital economy, publishers need to rethink how their users value the information they provide. What do these users do with the content? What can you do to help these users become more productive or work more efficiently? This is the essence of infocommerce, and many publishers still have not harnessed its full potential. Some are still stuck in the old mindset that they produce "textbooks" or "newspapers" or "journals". Instead, they should be thinking about how their content can be integrated with software to offer decision-support systems, or how their content could be used by an online marketer to shorten the sales cycle.

Free will be part of the mix but finding a way to create value-added, premium content, is going to be the challenge of the early 21^st century for publishers.  This is where my attention is focused.

Product placement and other payoffs to publishers

I am a huge fan of blogging. I think it is the source of the next wave of SIPA members. At the same time, blogging has lowered the barriers to entry to such an extent that there is literally no cost but time. That has enabled a flood of people to enter the field for fun and/or profit. As part of that, we have seen a wide range of entrants.

Some are using their blog to create awareness and sell other products or services. Some are just sharing their opinions and interests, and some are seeing revenue from product placement, sponsorships, or various payoffs (and I don't necessarily mean that to sound as sinister as it might, on the other hand it can). You hear about at home mothers who start blogs and are receiving merchandise and payments for favorable mentions. That's blurring the traditional lines. Various government officials have raised the issue and the prospect of some sort of regulation grows.

So, what should traditional SIPA members feel about this? These are competitors but there's no putting that genie back in the bottle. And, in many cases they're creating celebrity or notoriety and then cashing in on it. That may sound appealing to publishers under pressure. But, what's the longterm prospect?

What do you think about this?

What will people pay for?

I've been thinking about the future of specialized publishing. Actually, publishing in general. I think the demand for information, content, of all types, is greater than it's ever been. That should clearly be great news. But the picture is rather more clouded than that.

With all of this content available, what are people willing to pay for? I don't know, but I'm encouraged by several examples of successful paid content.

Apple's iStore is the first example that comes to mind. While Napster, Grok, and LimeWire enabled free sharing of music, Apple made it cheap and easy to buy music legally. And they do, to the tune of $1 Billion. It's too early to know for sure but the Kindle (and possibly other e-readers) are making it possible for people to pay to subscribe to a newspaper that they can access largely or entirely for free online. So, if it's cheap and easy, people are willing to pay for content.

Mobile phone providers are following this model as well, offering TV and radio through the phone. As I write this, mobile carriers have chosen to make these premium services fairly expensive, given that TV on my phone is likely a secondary TV access. If they took the Apple or Amazon Kindle approach, they'd provide a "basic cable" type service that is low priced -- maybe $.99 per month. Imagine how many people would pay for it at that price. And, they'd sell more high end phones.

But, these examples are more about the pipeline, the distribution channel, then they are about the content. And, by the way, the content is mostly entertainment, not business information. What are the implications for SIPA members?

Let me go back to the point I made earlier -- the demand for information is greater than it has ever been. It's a simple calculation based on the size of the population and the accessibility of information technologies. At the same time, how much more information can you process? I'm pretty maxed out. There are times when I avoid looking at my cell phone because I can't deal with another email. And, I subscribe to fewer things now than I did 5 or 10 years ago.

So, how are we going to make money in this business? People will still buy information if it's packaged in the right way and priced reasonably. And, in this Google-ized world, the packaging may well be unbundled. I don't want to join or subscribe. I want to pay by the drink as I find and consume the information I want, at the moment I find it.

So, a REALLY easy method of payment is going to be important to facilitate purchases in the moment. Apple and Amazon have done that by having you signed into your account most of the time so you only have to open your wallet once to put in your credit card info. But, they can make a proprietary system work because they have such an enormous and broad product offering.

SIPA members, and most publishers, can't get critical mass so we're going to depend on micropayment technologies. PayPal is close but I don't think we're there yet. These will require a universal sign-in, like OpenID, in the same way that purchasing on credit was facilitated by the advent of credit cards which substantially replaced the use of proprietary store charge cards. I think we need to see these arriving in the market in the next 18-24 months.

Once that's in place, SIPA members are going to have to find a way to deliver the information value in as convenient formatting as possible, through an almost frictionless ecommerce transaction. All while maintaining brutal efficiency to be able to keep prices as low as possible.

Of course, we may find that it's less expensive to give away the information and find a way to sell premium upsell products. The music industry analogy is highly appropriate here. Yes, most artists still make money selling CDs or MP3s, but they know a lot of that market is being siphoned off through illegal, and virtually uncontrollable, copying. But, you can't copy a seat at a concert. So, they're selling record numbers of concert tickets.

They also sell all sorts of merchandise, online at the concerts. And, they're selling concert DVDs, which are still somewhat harder to illegally copy and distribute than music files. And, they're finding they can make a lot of money with private performances for corporations or wealthy individuals. They're selling ringtones, which are also still somewhat harder to illegally copy for many cell phones.

Basically, they're giving away their traditional bread-and-butter and selling premium services. Any lessons for us SIPA members? What do you think?

Are newsletters dead? I say no. But ...

Yesterday I received the a note from a friend and long time SIPA member. He had just read the cover story about the June conference in this week's issue of Hotline. He said:

In reading the lead piece in Hotline quoting you, I'm not sure I would have chosen "optimism shining through" as the headline, but so be it. I'm just wondering -- is the subtext of what pretty much each of you said that subscription products as we know and love them are a dead issue? And if so, are you phasing them out of your product mix (other than custom/ad-supported/magazine-like)? I recently visited another publisher I hadn't seen in a number of years. When I sat down in her office, her first words were, "So newsletters are dead. What's new with you?" She wasn't joking, and she only has 1.

The dilemma is that those core newsletter subscribers, who are dwindling rapidly in number, are by far still the best buyers. Back in the DM days you/we always insisted on lists with proven purchasing power behind them. That's not really an option any more, especially if you're dealing with online marketing primarily. You can generate more leads, but it's a lot more expensive to turn those leads into buyers -- let alone buyers across multiple products.

So from a practical standpoint it seems like everyone is saying that at least for B2B (and Ed, I have separate questions about pubs such as the Harvard NLs; that's for another day), it isn't worth the effort/expense of trying to keep NLs alive -- too expensive in terms of opportunity cost, and futile to boot.

Am I reading you right?

Here's what I said to him:

We are looking closely at newsletters. I think there is still a place for them, and other print publications, but it’s more limited than it used to be. I do think there is a fundamental shift in the way most people want to consume information. Just-in-time information is in greater demand, and a periodical, in any form, doesn’t fit that need nicely.

Searchable databases, blog posts and tweets, and RSS headline feeds seem better suited. At the same time, I continue to believe that expert commentary is valued (although with the low barriers to entry, the premium value has diminished). For years we had the wonderful luxury of having communities committed through the expenditure of a substantial subscription fee. The paradigm has shifted substantially and many people are accustomed to getting the community for free. The challenge is to foster the same level of commitment.

The optimism at the conference was real to me. People seemed to think there is a viable path to success, and the feeling seemed to be that we can get there. I was pleasantly surprised. At the same time, I suspect there will be some who aren’t ready to make the effort required, or can’t figure it out, and they’re going to have a hard time over the next few years. But, the information needs won’t go away and someone will step in to fill the void, in the way the customers now expect, and SIPA will have a new prospective member, if we’re able to reach out to them effectively. That’s our challenge for the coming year – figuring out how to be relevant to the next wave of specialized information publishers