The most important change in the creative industries in recent years is the huge increase in the amount of information produced. When the supply of media and art content becomes greater than demand, the value of the content approaches zero. We are moving towards a time when there will be unlimited access to content, and value is created on reasons to experience certain content over the other. This growth is changing how we interact and experience the online world. I would like to expand on this and point out why participation is driving the change in the media and curation.

One point of view on the changes of media is to argue that artist is the game changer. You know, musician now being able to create personal connections with the listeners and offer methods of acquiring the creative piece directly. Distribution can be controlled via technology at home, meaning the game changers are definitely not the traditional music labels, publishing houses or broadcasters. The artist is much better positioned to take advantage on the opportunities for the participation.

Participation as the central part of experience, has been in my interest for years. I’ve dreamed up in London how paintings would be more interesting if people could touch them, installations would bring more emotions when you can walk amongst them and music would be best when listened live. As a blogger since 2004, i’ve betting my work on the fact that “objective” journalism will subdue to “subjective” blogging, where participation is a driving force to grow and retain audience. Through these experiences it does seem that artist is entering a new kind of era, where everyone is expecting curation to be part of the content:

1. Creative work cannot rely on collecting and publishing content. Participation and communication are central part of any creative content from now on.

2. Because of the first point: Content is King, Context is King Kong.

3. Capability of the technology used for presentation is equally important as the art itself.

4. Limits of content no more have impact on consumptions. Only thing limiting is the quality of curation ie. question “why this experience and not that”.

In addition, growing trends of art and media consumption are powering the designers of tools to be the game changers. Right beside the artists themselves. Therefore, major part of the impact of the internet on creative industries is the ability of technology to power participation and communication.

Risks that creation will become populist work, where artistic reflection takes no place, are far from the truth. Successful creative projects always derive their success from the connections and ability to create context for their work. This means focus on the most important features and development of audience in a lean way. To succeed in this, engage your audience to refine concepts, processes and practises. Hmmm…sounds a lot like lean startup methods, which it is in many ways.

The designing of experience, context and curation are THE art. Content comes second and will have no value (even if given for free) without the experience. That is the impact of the internet as we are moving from studios and galleries to the streets and screens.

After 3 years of work with bloggers and other indie creators, I’ve come to a conclusion that these are the massive shifts in media.

Brands as Publishzers

Yes, in addition to the traditional inclusion of companies/products, a blogger is a brand as well. Most importantly, brands do not necessary just publish and advertise on media sites. We are seeing a massive shifts of brands going into publishing and content distribution with their own properties on unique domain, Facebook, Twitter and on Publishzer.

The brands are replacing the traditional publishers outright. So, does content creation by commercial brands sound repulsing to you? Well, tradional publishers can’t monetise their flat distribution and product plans. If banners are your only method, readers are not going to get on that train.

This change is not about being dependent on where people read, but how and why they read. Big media is becoming a playground for owned and earned media properties that can scale. A playground of platforms, where brands do not need a buyer in the middle.

Media agencies become the secondary market.

This takes us to the fact that media agencies are scared for a reason. The big journalism and the big data markets are much bigger than media agencies. That’s where the big clients are playing. In media purchase, more than 40% of measured media budgets are shifting towards content-generation just in 2012.

Banner ads are being put into their proper place, which is lower end slots in less important sites, and replaced by rich, original content and stories driven by experiences that have real value. The value cannot be predetermined, but is created together with readers. They are the ones who bridge the gap for their friends.

It’s about remixing, creating new experiences and sharing them with others. We are outdated with the tracking mechanisms and need something else than CPM, CPC or CPA. Some 50% of media spent is not accounted for and many are getting sick of it. So are people who consume, remix and share content. They simply don’t want banners flooding their content and social media feeds.

The influence on a purchase and the key mindset in engagement is discovery, not the feeling of being served. Great experiences obviate the intent to purchase. Purchasing a product is a state of mind. Purchases happen through sharing, not selling.

(This post is influenced by this)

One of the hottest social networks right now is Pinterest. It his a nice spot at the need for organising huge amounts of information and our look out for beautiful inspirations. One important aspect is a high rate of female adoption, that continues to drive the adoption of eCommerce. Hence Pinterest is interesting for commerce, as some sources indicate that every click to an webshop site is worth an average of $5 in purchases.

What I am interest is the communal aspect of the service. It heavily focuses on recipes, travel imaginary and to some length fashion. For anyone interested in these, the site is interesting. However, the huge and growing adoption of Pinterest might eventually be the downfall. It might not be able to hold up to its community and therefore loose users to more highly niche focused communities. Curation is not curation if will not be able to edit out the unnecessary noise. Even following feature will not be enough eventually.

So what if we look this from another perspective. What is we think curation as a disruption to marketing, rather than just another social network. Currently online marketing is push with high volumes of banners. What if marketers would enable cashpools for users to create curated contents around topics, and earn real revenue from their curation work.

I think by creating well operating service that enables focus around nodes of interest or brands, we can enable these nodes to create actions that are fulfilled by the crowd. This crowdsourcing will boost highly focused and curated content for relevant target groups. All evolving around the node, rather than in a huge mass of different content. That is the real disruption potential of curation.

Marketers, remember. This could also make the world better by distributing revenue around to the best users. Do not think people are willing to work for free forever. I’m most certainly going to look at niche-curation content platforms as a powerful way to encourage a meaningful interaction with prospects and buyers.

Photo: Teppo Hudson

Everybody wants to be digital today and most magazine executives today seems to be building iPad apps. Yet the user experience of a print magazine is unmatchable: they’re cheap, never out of battery charge, not a target for thieves and they have twice the screen space when spread as an iPad screen.

The concept of magazines is great and without bringing it to the same level on digital, the executives are running a losing war. Lets consider the recent experience of one of my favorite magazines, The Economist. I subscribed to their iPad mag. First of all, the subscription takes me away from the app, to website with 2 options. €32 13 weeks and 125€ for 51 weeks. But I’d like to pay monthly as is the status quo on most of my subscription services. Sure I could pay per issue, but then there would be no auto-renew.

Granted, this is a small issue in the grand scale. But come on, take a que from something like Spotify, where I do not need to renew, they have my credit card info and its conveniently everywhere I go. That is a well done subscription service. Secondly, most successful magazine concepts in digital media are blog communities. No fees, no limits but high quality accessibility, funded by quality and relevant advertising.

I believe the key on saving the magazine industry is accessibility. Whether it is magazine subscription or advertising funded, the key is to provide seamless accessibility. Let me work a little at the beginning if needed, but aim to guide me to a state where I have the magazine when and where I want to, without forms to fill. This obviously needs security matters, but that I trust you’ve taken care, right? That is accessibility.

So remember that:
- Monthly fees appear lower than yearly fees
- Cancel anytime feature will enable easier testing
- Have auto-renew as default
- Advertising should be relevant and considered part of the content

If this is taken care, all you really need to focus is having great content.

Photo by: Teppo Hudson

In the last couple of days I’ve read a lot of different analyses and articles about the next big thing and the near term development in business. Obviously this is natural as we’ve just had our new years celebrations, and it is natural for us to predict what is going to happen at the start of something new. This time, to my delight, I’ve found number of predictions that mention that curation is the big think in 2012.

Essentially curation allows you to create collections of things that you are inspired of. This is interesting in regards to the evolution of social media, like Elad Gill talked about in his post. However, samething similar is happening in regarding the evolution of online media. Most users don’t bother to create content themselves, still they bother to share it in different structured forms.

Therefore, as the earlier waves of online and social media have changed the way we consume information, the “curation wave” will add to the way we find and interact with content. This is what Gill puts forward in his thoughts as well and we at Publishzer agree. Just to make my point clear, I want to define that it is not a revolution but rather an evolution.

The evolution of online media can be broadly seen the following ways. With online media, I cover the industry that serves advertisers to target communication efforts to boost their own businesses:

1995-2000 Online portals
Online portals started with AOL, followed with Yahoo and now basically every single newspaper or indie publisher has their own news portal. Taking content online became a big thing for the late 90′s as it was believed to boost business exponentially.

2000-2006 Search Engines
Lead by Google’s beautifully executed technology, searching became a big thing in online media. You would not anymore need to struggle to find content if you really knew what you were looking for. The whole process had great business model opportunities and eventually search was taken into every online media company, along with the portal idea.

2007-2011 Aggregation
RSS feed and subsequent feed readers were developed to help readers to aggregate their feeds to a single space. Eventually social media services like Facebook and Twitter, incorporated the aggregation into the heart of their service. Finally aggregation was brought to the portals in the form of like and tweet buttons.

2012-201? Curation tools
Currently above evolutions are standard in any online media service. And two-way communication is becoming so important culturally, that online media cannot exclude it anymore. Combined with the exponentally growing amount of information consumed, we are at the point where curation really has some value to add.

Online media has always had a role in organising information. Social media has had it’s own evolution, where it first started to flirt with online media with aggregation tools. Currently social and online media are merging at the point of curation because curation has always been the value of media, while information overload drives social to become more curated. I strongly believe the process of curation will redefine everything from portals, search, blogging, social and aggregation. This will start to happen in 2012 and that’s why it is the next big thing this year.

Photo: Publishzer

Now that we are developing Publishzer forward, getting great data from the Christmas campaign and about launch public beta soonish (with brand new design!), I’ve often been thinking what will be the key elements that make us great. With lots of study, tinkering and late night discussions I’ve settled to the following three. I believe if we nail these, nothing will stop Publishzer.

Team
It’s about the people. Not just skills, but the passion to drive this truck through the burning pain of getting it on it’s feets. And to be clear, working on this is the most amazing thing I can imagine, just that startups are really tough projects.

We truly got the passion, how about skills? The perfect thing with me and Rainer is that we talk to each day over the phone. Often late at night at 10:30, share ideas and so do really fast test will the idea hold. Those moments are the ones that truly drive innovation, and, from the bottom of my heart, I feel that work colleagues are required to be able to call at any time. In addition, we are actively talking to users and presenting them the first drafts of design or code. I mean, the way we apply our current knowledge is phenomenal.

Technology
Oh, how I wish you guys could already see what we have developed. Publishzer has beautifully metged the glossy of print and the interactivity of web. No kidding, it is amazing.

The technology we have developed, which is currently having finishing touches, works because it focuses on design and usability. Key elements for us is the easy way of adding/organising content and superb presentation with print like ethos. The concept is also pushed to have clear differentiation features from other similar projects.

Traction
This is our missing link. We have been in a closed phase with limited promotion efforts, and are still invite only. Still with the test campaign, engagement rates per magazine and visitors have been 20x higher than current display ads are performing. And there is already a constant base of visitors, so its we are getting there with the traction.

Yours truly,
Teppo

Credits:
Team photo by HarrietG
Technology photo from Publishzer 2.0
Traction photo source