Content Matters

Google's David Eun was the closing keynote. David came from traditional media (Time Warner, etc.) so has an interesting perspective on the Google culture. He described it as an engineering culture with heart, suggesting that the young staff has lots of energy and aren't the skeptics that you'd find in most businesses.  He suggested that Google's culture had "the heart of the Red Cross and the work ethic of an investment bank".

David reiterated their core principals:
1. Focus on the User
2. Bottom-up innovation and sharing of ideas
3. Launch quickly then iterate, noting that "perfection is the tyranny of good enough".  As an example, he described how they release an update to YouTube about every six weeks.

Eun spent a lot of time talking about the ubiquity of content and how "false scarcity" of content no longer holds up.  He suggested that publishers can embrace this ubiquity; even if they have a subscription model, they can push out samples and teaser content via many sites (including video).

One stat that resonated is that 35% of their revenue comes from the contextually relevant text ads on publishing partner pages.  That's higher than I would have guessed but it shows that Google has been effective in its strategy to help publishers monetize their pages. 

It's clear that a lot of Google's focus now is on YouTube.  Talking about the Long Tail, Eun focused on what he called the "torso", which he sees as the sweet spot for small publishers.  While the large media players will always have the hits that drive the head and individual bloggers and posters will make up the tail, he described how many professional publishers had launched successful channels on YouTube, giving the example of the Professional Bull Riders' Association.  For most publishers, he acknowledged, you won't make much advertising money on YouTube yet, even with the new overlay ads, so, the question for a publisher ask is how can I use services like youTube or Google to make samples of my content ubiquitous?