Content must be freed. Not necessarily free.
Two weeks ago, at the Like Minds Conference we listened to Guy Clapperton bemoan free content, and then last week the twitterverse lit up with commentary as The Times announced their first paywall subscribers figures, which could be seen as good/mediocre/terrible (select your bias here). However, I am more interested in a different type of “free”.
It is best put by Razorfish’s white paper titled Nimble (by @rlovinger – a MUST READ), which posits that content should be certainly free as in libre, but not necessarily free as in gratis. This rings particularly true after a few conversations last week with major publishers that have major difficulties in exploiting the value of their huge archives, due to technological constraints.
Whether you can charge for your content distracts from a core issue which plays into all future business models and business value. If your customers pay for your content, great! But regardless of the pricing strategy and revenue model, content should be unshackled, able to travel, and endlessly reusable.
It is this type of free that allows us to work for paid-content AND “open” content publishers. Whether you are a book publisher, magazine house, news organisation, digital media property or a brand, your content is only truly valuable when it is liberated from legacy restrictions.
To quickly make the case for libre content, for those unbelievers who have somehow found their way to this post…
- In a digital world, your content must be replicable. If it costs much manual time to retype, reformat, or otherwise repurpose, then you are losing valuable margin on new products and services that you can deliver.
- In a digital world, your content must be accessible. Regardless of whether it must be paid for, if your content is not easily accessible, it will be ignored. Accessibility implies ease of access for all. Not just those that want it as a PDF.
- In a digital world, your content must be understandable. This is where things really get clever – and your content really valuable. For your content to be libre free, it must be understandable by machines, so that you don’t have to spend time and money searching, finding, checking, classifying and re-delivering content for various purposes every time it can to be used. ‘Understandable’ implies metadata. If a partner store wants to use some content to sell a particular product, can you automatically slice off the relevant content for them? If a new story breaks and you need to quickly see what media you hold on similar topics from the past decades, can you see and reuse this? Can you push content off for a topic-specific iPad app? Can you syndicate the content that paying clients want, when they want it? The basics might be metadata such as author name, length and published date. Additional context should certainly include topics – people, places, issues, themes, generated by some form of semantic analysis. Perhaps you will make use of even more granular descriptions, such as political slant, sentiment towards a brand, or positive and negative tone, generated by other applications of content analytics.
There are three key moves that most publishers must make, in order for their content to be truly freed. Some might be very expensive. Some might be time-consuming. But if your company’s value is locked up in an archive (or many separate archives), a long-term view must be taken.
Analogue to digital
Most publishers understand the need for this, but cost is the normal holdup. Digitisation can be done in several ways, but usually involves some form of OCR scanning to turn a PDF from an unanalysed ‘image’, into a string of words, perhaps including some design and formatting elements. It is a good idea to go as far as possible with this one process. If you are digitising, why not use content analysis techniques to extract concepts and issues in order to classify each piece of content at the same time?
Proprietary to open
The second move is from proprietary systems to open ones, where open means “content in a raw form can be extracted easily.” Several publishers I have spoken to recently, now have more than 5 proprietary formats across their various systems, making a coherent content strategy impossible. A complete no-brainer requirement for any digital content system must be that it easily lets go of content, ideally in a simple XML schema.
Siloed to integrated
Finally, there is a move to integrate all the separate systems that have built up over time. Some large publishing groups have digital asset management systems and content management systems that number well into the double-digits. This doesn’t mean that the content literally has to be all in one system, but it does mean that business critical functions, like search, do not have to be replicated multiple times for each system in order to get coverage of the archive.
Content needs to be free as a bird. After that, use every method you can to extract value from it.
Well said Andrew. I think “Big Media’s” lack of understanding of this is what is really hurting them.
Thanks Phil. It’s particularly painful when I speak to a publisher that mostly understands this, but can’t get the organisation to move quickly, and so is still authoring content under systems that will mean expensive metadata creation and integration efforts will be needed later. Talk about creating a rod for your own back…
It’s a lovely semantic distinction between free “gratis” and free “libre”
Agile content certainly needs to be at the heart of every publisher’s strategy – if it isn’t they’ll be out of business soon – because it is much more cost effective to make existing content sweat (via creative repurposing) than it is to ask authors, designers, page setters and editors to create new content.
Book publishers have been very focused on repackaging old content for 2-3 years as a means of driving the cost of business down (hence the growth in the nostalgia categories).
In my experience a book publisher focused on reuse and repurposing content can drive book development costs down by around 20-25% year in year without any loss of quality (it also avoids author advances). The problem is, legacy content only stretches so far before it runs out.
Another big problem is rights management. Most publishers only own the rights to the “work” – i.e the work published as en entire piece and not “fragments” of. Thus, when the desire to publish “collated” or “assembled” pieces arises, it’s an admin nightmare getting the permissions and renegotiating the contracts. Any system that assist with rights management as well content structure and organisation will help make content “free” libre and agile
The best placed publishers in this respect are those that have deep pools of “collective” works. In these cases the publishers usually own the content outright. The downside is the content lacks a distinctive voice and will be lost amongst the noise.
So, the key to better content in the long term is, as you say, making it libre
In my view, publishers can spend a few years dusting off old titles but the real growth and acceleration potential will come from being able to retrieve parts or “chunks” of newly invested content for agile reuse and getting the permissions fast (preferably pre-negotiated).
Furthermore, any capital expenditure such as investment in IT and systems can be amortised over 3 years and more easily absorbed when the business has made several commercial uses of the content and is better placed to take the hit. These are exciting times.
Thanks for the comment Stephen – practically a post in itself! Yes – great point re the rights issue. That does seem to crop up just as much as the technical challenges. Part of the metadata of existing content should certainly be rights/ownership information – and pre-negotiating re-use rights on all current and future content must be a vital part of origination.
Wonderfully stated, Andrew. And certainly something worth sharing throughout the industry. It’s funny, there are a lot of really intelligent people in the publishing industry who seem to get this concept, but they have difficulty leveraging their organizations to be able to adapt from the “old way” and into a way that embraces what you’re suggesting.
It is great to see you tackling this very important topic, Andrew, and applying your knowledge of the industry to it.
However, to put this in context, (and just in case the medium/message/massage issues are overly active!) it is perhaps worth pointing out that these issues have been quite well trammelled in other industries. For example, in the software industry the interpretation: ” ‘free speech’ not ‘free beer’ ” has been made for a some time.
I claim no detailed knowledge of this now well developed field but, for example, the Free Software Foundation (http://www.fsf.org/) was founded 25 years ago and the definition of free software (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) has evolved continually since. See also the usual source for an overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
Not unrelated to this is the development of a comprehensive range of Creative Commons licences, of which I sure you are aware: http://creativecommons.org/ Also, readers might or might know of the considerable contributions to this field by Lawrence Lessig http://www.lessig.org/, again see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig
Enough of the reading list! It is perhaps worth bringing this back around to the question of the medium (or, in communication-speak, “channel”), and to relate this to points by Stephen Bateman about the management of rights, rather than just the rights themselves.
While the technology of the communication of content may not seem important to the theoretical rights (attribution and licensing), surely it is fundamentally important to the practical management (administration, policing and enforcement) of those rights. Presumably the reason that “copyright” (i.e. the right to copy, as distinct from the right to read, to modify, to translate …) made practical sense for paper-based communication was due to the technology: not least, that the printing presses required to copy in volume were expensive, bulky and noisy, and therefore relatively easy to detect and police. The act of reading the content, on the other hand, was extremely difficult to detect, and therefore to police.
With electronic (digital) content, in general the reverse is true; hence the advent of, and controversy about, “digital rights management”.
It is also interesting to see your introduction of the “value” of content to this discussion, as this complements the points you made in your previous post.
Your insight into the many facets of this field are very valuable. Thank you for posting them.
Great comment John! Thanks for inputting from the wealth of your experience.
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