First online live broadcsting of a football game in Belgium

Standard - Everton was live broadcasted on the rtlinfo web site (member of the RTL group). It's a unique experience in the Belgian media landscape and I must admit I was quite happy. I did watch the game from Goteborg in Sweden for and it was a great home feeling. It's also worth noticing that RTL didn'tforeseen to monetize the TV ad display over the internet. Net result for the online audience during the TV ad : open micro with privatejokes from the RTL team, funny live shoots while waiting an on AIR slot, scripting of the discussion for the second half and so on... The only ad we get for this live broacast - a introducing ad video and 2 footer display banners...Talking about Itv ?...Many opportunities for improvement :-)

LinkedIn to launch their own Ad Network

LinkedIn already sells ads against this audience on its own site, targeted by industry, seniority, company size, geography, gender, and number of connections. Now, it will expand that targeting to other partner sites. Publishers will have to apply to become part of the ad network, but LinkedIn will probably try to sign up some of its existing content partners such as the Businessweek, CNBC, and the New York Times... and why not business to business publishers like Wolters Kluwer.

LinkedIn knows it has a valuable audience (see the demographic presentation here), and now wants to sell access to that audience to others. Although LinkedIn will always make more money off the ads it shows on its own site (since it doesn’t have to split those ads three ways with Collective Media and the partner sites). Perhaps LinkedIn realizes that it will never become a big enough site on its own to justify its recent $1 billion valuation. (Although employees can only sell shares at a $500 million valuation). This will create incremental revenues for LinkedIn. And for publishing site partners it offers a potentially more lucrative set of remnant inventory that it can throw ads up against.

Source : Techcrunch France

Business Model evolution in the music industry

2007 is a cornerstone year in the music industry. Various business model have been tested and I guess that 2008 will see some trends emerging. Let's take the Radiohead example, no figure have been officially released but simply the fact that a well established band can produce, market and distribute his own music is already a revolution. The perception of the workload (and cost) is not always reflected in the price the people wanted to give away for the In Rainbow Record (average of 2.5£). Now that this action is closed and that the album is regularly distributed through I-tunes and XL recording, I'm wondering if it was just not a marketing action....

Madonna is another example, she signed an all in contract with the concert promoter Live Nation (Clear Channel), valued at 120m$ for 3 albums, concert organization, selling merchandising and Licensing her name. That contract is also unique because behind live Nation, clear channel owns a full supply chain for the music industry from Radio to ticketing and venue. The value add of such deal for Clear Channel is huge !

The open source model is also applicable for another segment of artists. Smaller artists (in term of audience ,not in term of quality !) can benefit from free distribution and social platform like Jamendo with their 2530.000+ users to create a buzz and get noticed by professionals.

To conclude, many other alternative where elaborated but in essence to go back to the primary objective of this blog (publishing industry), the value chain is not changing in the music industry. The content (the music itself) is more and more accessible for free on the web and the value added of the actors need to be refine to establish new business models. Orgnaization like the Rolling Stone (not sure if I can still call them band :-) needs a new record to promote a worldwide tour, the money is defenitely not generated by that new album. I can see similar trend in the publishing industry, the information is more and more available for free and adaptation are needed to monetize new value added.

Business model in the web2.0

From the publisher angle, we don't really know how to monetize the social web. I'll try to list the Business model applied today (November 2006...) and check if it's applicable for a profesional publisher. I already hear in the background that there is not way to monetize what the community is producing... Let's see !

1. Advertising, the most common one. Mainly driven by AdSense (but the figure must remains confidential as explained in google's terms and conditions). Surprisingly enough the better the content is the less you get paid by user (arghhhh...), did you know that 15% of the revenue generated by AdSense is originating from Domain Parking pages !
   
2. Begging aka "please donate if you like my site". Wikimedia, the fundation behind wikipedia is a good example. It's also described as the "camgirl" phenomenon, which is not applicable for professional publisher (send me picture of your colleague to evaluate that business case:-). I also doubt about building a whishlist for my company...
3. Membership. This is more intersting for me, you create executive club and ask for membership. it's not a subscription in the publisher sense because you just join a club to participate in discussion. Example salon.com
4. Target to be acquired... Well I'm not planning to build new product with the idea of being overtaken by the competition. Nevertheless, If you have set up an original project in the legal and regulatory content world and if you targeted such business model give me a sign I might be interested (no kidding...). The latest example is YouTube being acquired by google just because of the traffic it generates.
5. We can't target a single business model, it will often be a combination of the above mentionned model.
   
6. And Finally, I Don't need a business Model ! Actulally, a lot of social web stuff are there because of some passionated and individual volunteer. They are trying stuff, mashing up ideas and jumping from one to the other. The sense of being profitable is non existing, except when they get a site which is adopted and when they are facing more cost than expected...