Content Matters

Google VP of Content Partnerships David Eun posted a position statement to the Google Blog this week, restating and summarizing Google's positions vis-a-vis copyrights and its relationship with content providers.

The statement was made largely in response to the recent Belgian newspaper ruling, but also in response to general concerns by publishers about their relationship with Google.

The key points he hits on include:

1. Google respects copyright law
2. Google offers publishers the ability to opt-out
3. Google looks to partner with content providers to generate revenues together

In a jab to the newspapers, Google analogizes its excerpting of news articles to the way that newspapers excerpt books in their reviews.  Ouch.
Google reiterates that they are not in the content creation business and that they help bring together consumers and creators of content.

I think recent offerings like Google News Archive Search demonstrate that Google is generating more opportunities for content provider than they might be hurting.  Content providers who learn to embrace Google will thrive, while those who wish to fight them will find themselves missing out on huge opportunities.

John Battelle summarizes Google's position clearly as "I sense that Google is starting to truly declare its position relative to content creation companies, and it's this: we're not in your business, and won't be. We might impact your business, and in significant ways, but you can't sue us for that, brother. Now, let's go make tons of money, together....and if our margins are higher than yours, well, that's not our fault...."

Courtesy of Heather Green's Blogspotting, comes the news that Delicious has reached 1 million users, up from about 300,000 when Yahoo bought them less than a year ago.

Now, that's not MySpace or YouTube growth, but it's pretty solid, particularly considering the fact that Yahoo has not done a lot to promote the social bookmarking application.  Most of its growth is from viral marketing.

One question I would have is how active these million users are.  Are these people who have tagged 5-10 pages or 100?  Have these users all bookmarked new pages in the past 30 days?  60 or 90?   
My second question is how many of these users are using it truly as a social bookmarking tool, i.e. sharing their bookmarks and adding others to their network (and looking at their bookmarks)?

I'm a delicious user, but I use it more as a portable bookmarking tool so that I can access my bookmarks from my desktop or laptop (or last year, from a PC on a cruise ship).  I rarely take advantage of the social capabilities of delicious.

This is why I think the rumored Yahoo acquisition of Facebook would be a big boon to the company.  Yahoo has some great social networking components in Flickr and Delicious, but they remain somewhat niche products.  While I commend Yahoo for letting its acquired companies remain independently managed (I've been involved in too many acquisitions where integration was a nightmare), having a strong platform like Facebook, with tight integration of these other social networking tools, could drive usage.

A colleague at Convera let me know that they are seeking a Senior Product Manager to be based in their Vienna, VA (DC-area) headquarters.
Convera has been enhancing their enterprise search platform to take advantage of various semantic capabilities. 

Here are the details.  Feel free to mention the Content Matters blog in your response.

Content Industry consultants Outsell have released the 2007 edition of Information Industry Outlook: FutureFacts.

This is the tenth annual edition of FutureFacts and is timed to coincide with their annual GO conference.  FutureFacts includes an overview of key trends in various segments of the information industry, overall market trends and their top 10 predictions for 2007.  Outsell also provides a scorecard of how it did with its 2006 predictions.

The primary theme of this year's report is "Execute on the Essentials".  With growth slowing in the industry, success will be tied to strong execution to ensure revenue growth.

A few highlights from the report:
High growth segments of the information industry the next four years will include Search, Aggregation & Syndication, HR Information, Market Research and Credit & Financial Information.  At the bottom end of the market will be News Providers and Yellow Pages & Directories.  The overall annual growth rate for the information industry is predicted to be 6.4% for the four year period.

User expectations continue to grow, while their experiences continue to disappoint.  The time spent on information tasks continues to rise (average knowledge worker now spends 13 hours per week using information vs. 11 hours just 2 years ago).  Yet, according to the report, the average user's Internet searches an amazing 31% of the time.  Some of the reason why users are spending more time on information tasks is their inability to get the right results from search engines.

Industry-wide growth is expected to slow to an average growth rate of between 6.0-6.5% over the next four years, bringing total revenue to $458 Billion by 2009.

The full report is available for free download at the Outsell web site.

Today came the announcement that startup Zecco will be launching shortly as a financial portal and online broker.   Zecco's key is that they plan to provide trading with zero commission fees.

Zecco is well-backed, with funding from industry leaders Morten Lund (early investor in Skype), Pier Baarsma (former CEO of Dutch Coca-Cola) and Soren Kenner, former Chairman of McCann Erickson Europe, and is led by founder Jeroen Veth, a former Merrill Lynch VP.

Veth's plan is to keep costs low by relying upon word-of-mouth and guerilla marketing, as opposed to the millions the big boys spend on advertising.  With zero commissions, the site will be funded by advertising.  According to Zecco, they plan to be at “the intersection where online brokerage meets Yahoo Finance and Myspace”.  They will offer social applications such as blogs and message boards.

Will this be enough to compete?  I'm not so sure.  For most investors (including active traders), execution is more important than price.  The $10 per share it costs to trade today really isn't a big issue for most. 

Free trading based on advertising sounds like a throwback to the good old pre-bubble days.  Could free delivery on dog food be far behind?

For more details on Zecco, see Om Malik's note.

UPDATE: See Mort Lund's blog for more information on Zecco's efforts.  He notes that "we use the same trading platform end the same settlement and clearance house as Etrade Canada and as many other brokers plus the fact that our customers are insured to $25 million   - more than competitors as a matter of fact." 

That being said, I still see a hard road ahead against well-funded competitors but they are likely to be somewhat of a disruptive force and will put pressure on eTrade, TD, Schwab and others.  It will be interesting to see how the big guys react - will they reduce commission rates, add more services or both?

The WSJ is reporting that Yahoo will acquire social networking site Facebook for roughly $1 billion.

Facebook has been the subject of a number of rumors this year, most notably Microsoft and Viacom, among others.  Following Murdoch's acquisition of MySpace, Facebook has been among the most attractive sites out there (with much fewer legal headaches than YouTube).

If the deal happens, it will be interesting to see what Yahoo does with it.  One of the attractions for users of Facebook has been its exclusivity.  Until recently, it was only available to students with a college email address.  Then it was rolled out to high school students and now to the public.  Just as Groucho Marx didn't want to belong to any club that would have him as a member, you could see users revolt as the velvet rope is opened to the masses.

On the positive side, with Flickr and Delicious in the fold,  Yahoo is clearly pursuing the social networking arena.  These tools could be very useful to the facebook community, encouraging users to share information with their network. 

This proposed deal is interesting, particularly in light of Yahoo's announcement this week that it expects to be at the low range of its revenue projections, due to slowdowns in advertising.  On one hand, diversifying their revenue base could be a positive.  Conversely, Yahoo management probably should be focusing on fixing the problems with the Panama search release and on their core PPM business.

For more thoughts on Yahoo, read Michael Parekh, Fred Wilson and Rafat Ali, who reports that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has no interest in selling right now.

User-generated content has become all the rage. 

Now, real estate valuation site Zillow has added a new layer of user-contributed content.  Starting today, users can register and claim their house on Zillow, updating the information that Zillow has in their database for your home (# of rooms, square footage, year built and more).  Zillow will used that information to update their valuation estimate for your home.

Now, we've all looked up recent sales to see how much someone paid for their house, but this brings pretentiousness to a new level.  Now, you can make sure that your neighbors think yours is the most expensive home on the block.  Want to impress your boss, your ex or the family across the street?  Just enhance your listing a bit and watch your supposed valuation soar...

The real estate bubble has created paper wealth for a lot of people, most of whom will never see the benefits of that, at least until retirement.  Unfortunately, that won't stop many of them from updating their Zillow profile in hopes of appearing to be ahead of the Joneses.

This week, I’ve been testing the New York Times Reader, released into beta last week.  The beta, available for download, is open to all registered NY Times users (or you can register when you download).  Users must be running Windows XP to install the Times Reader.

The Times Reader provides you with online and offline access to the complete edition of the New York Times in a format designed to emulate the print edition. 

Navigation is simple, with a menu bar for the various sections of the paper.  The Microsoft-designed interface is clean, with easy to use features like the ability to change font size, save, print or email an article with a single click.  A notes feature allows you to highlight, annotate or copy sections of the text easily.

One compelling feature is that the New York Times Reader downloads the content locally to your PC so that it’s available offline as well.  While web snobs may argue that offline access is quaint, there are many times when you may not be connected, but have time to read.  It takes a few minutes for your first download (and you need to download .net 3.0 framework, but daily downloads are fairly quick and can be scheduled.

In particular, the offline capabilities are a boon to commuters.  This morning, on my commuter train, as I browsed the Times on my laptop, the person next to me fired up their laptop (an HP with a stunning wide screen) and began to read today’s Times as well.  I’ve always maintained my subscription to the print version of the Times, mainly for commuting purposes.  I browse the WSJ online, but like to have something to read on the train.  With the new Times Reader, I’ll have full access to the Times during the commute.  It will be interesting to see how many commuters drop their print subscription with this switch.

A feature that I’d like to see would be integration with wireless devices.  Perhaps the killer app for Blackberry users would be to allow users to select individual articles from the Times Reader (via their PC), then have them automatically emailed in PDF form to a wireless device.  Or better, yet, I could subscribe to various columns and topics, to be emailed as a PDF attachment.  Then, I could read the articles I’m most interested in wherever I am, without having to boot up the laptop.

The Times Reader provides a comprehensive online and offline experience, by far the most compelling e-newspaper to-date.  The annotation and sharing functions support the behavior of users of the print version, who often tear out articles for later reference.  With new advances and standardization in ebook technology combined with solutions like the Times Reader, we’re finally at a point where digital reading can become mainstream.

For now, the New York Times Reader is free and will be through the remainder of the beta period.  Times Select features, such as content from editorial columnists are available for Times Select subscribers.  According to PaidContent, the decision has yet to be made whether it will continue to be free when it officially launches in 2007.  There’s little question in my mind that the New York Times Reader will cannibalize print sales.  But for an advertising-driven vehicle, the benefits of increased readership may outweigh any such losses.  It could also drive Times Select subscriptions, as those who give up the print version may still want access to the editorial content they’ve been accustomed to.

Watching the back and forth this week between the Senate Armed Services Committee and the White House on methods for interrogating and trying terror suspects reminds me of one of the basic tenets of partnership agreements: make it mutual.

Early in my career, when discussing whether certain partnership terms we were proposing were "fair", a colleague taught me a simple test: "make it mutual".  If we wanted to have the right to terminate after 90 days, were we comfortable allowing the partner to do the same?  If not, it's a pretty good indication that we're trying to carve out specific advantages for our side.

That seems to be the issue that John McCain, John Warner, Lindsay Graham and Colin Powell are espousing: if it's fair for us to convict someone without presenting the evidence to the defendant, would we feel comfortable having a foreign government convict one of our citizens without doing so?

Next time you sit down to negotiate a potential partnership and find yourself stuck on an issue, ask  your partner if they'd be willing to make it mutual.

Web analytics provider Hitwise has launched six "data centers" as ways to showcase its capabilities across various regions of the world.

Each of the six websites is hosted at a Hitwise location - the U.S., UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong.  Through the data centers you can get a snapshot view of online activity within that region.

Each site will provide a list of the 25 most visited websites, the leading search engines, top search terms by industry group and more.  For example, in comparing the top search terms that led users to click on sites categorized as "stocks" we see that most of the U.S. searches were for online brokers by name (scottrade, fidelity, Ameritrade, eTrade and Vanguard) while in Australia, most of the searches were for the Australian stock exchange and currency conversion.

Among the 25 most visited, you can see that nearly 5% of U.S. visits were to MySpace, which accounts for only 1% of Australian visits.

Obviously, these sites provide only a taste of the full Hitwise analytics, but they do give you a sense of the regional differences among web users.  For those of you with insatiable appetites for web analytics, here's one more sandbox to play in.