The Internet may want to be free, but those who create the most important content on the Internet – newspaper and magazine publishers, Internet publishers, individual bloggers – sometimes need to feed their families. They should not continue to be bystanders as others monetize their content. And they don’t have to be. With some gumption and creativity and a willingness (amid the jeers and hoots of bystanders) to experiment, a new business model (that is actually the old business model) can be created that optimizes both advertising and circulation revenue. The alternative is continued hand-wringing and the continued extinguishing of quality journalism.
9:45 AM
Fire Your Network: The Great Debate
The controversy that just won’t die, whether ad networks are good or bad for branded media, rages on over a year after it started. To engage the issue anew we assembles publishers who have made the hard (often costly) choice of firing their networks along with networks who argue their math and models are all wrong. Can any but the largest brands rely solely on their own sales force? Is it really better to fill empty inventory with house ads rather than lease it to networks? And are there better models out there where publisher and network can realize higher CPMs together?
10:30 AM
The Payment Plan: Pipe Dream or Promise?
Like clockwork, whenever publishers see their ad sales dip online, talk about the necessity of the pay model re-emerges. It didn’t work in 1997…or 2002. Is there something different about 2009 that will make consumers pay now, when they actually have less disposable income? Are pay-to-play ideas simply non-starters that waste publisher resources? Or perhaps there are other revenue streams and packaging types this time around? We bring together publishers who are revisiting the pay-to-play model, skeptics from the media buying community, and some content providers who say they need models outside of advertising. View Presentation Slides
11:15 AM
Coffee BreakLocation: Atrium
11:30 AM
Coffee with the Clients: What is the Media Brew in 2010?
Our annual meeting with the media buyers poses some questions that are on every publisher’s lips this year. How do we serve you better and get more of your dwindling budgets? Will branding campaigns and display budgets come back this year or next? What audience metrics matter most in choosing sites? Are we competing with ad networks for the same dollar, and how are content brands figuring into your plans? What technologies and formats are buyers looking for? . Should content brands play a role in your social media strategy for clients? And what role does context play amid data-driven technologies that leverage audiences more than content?
12:15 PM
Always Room for More: Breathing New Life Into Old Categories
Just when you think that headline aggregation, sport analysis, women’s content and gossip are pretty much saturated online along come the likes of Daily Beast, National Football Post, Yahoo! Shine and Perez Hilton. Meanwhile, an old portal like AOL and even vertical ad networks are restructuring themselves as niche content publishers, spinning out new brands that seem designed to ride media fragmentation rather than fight it. Is this an ever-expanding universe of new, more targeted nano-publishers? Can portals and major media really play this game? And what special value if any do these upstart insta-brands bring to consumers and advertisers? Should old guard media learn from this new guard, partner with them, or just buy them out?
Hyper-distribution was the meme of last year, but now that your content is getting everywhere, what are the strategies for monetizing it off site? Syndication deals, portal partnerships, widgets, video embeds, aggregation (with and without permission) and social media can put your brand and content in front of more eyeballs away from your site than on it. Is this always a good thing, especially if others make more from your content than you do? How can publishers craft content packages that bring advertising with them? Can they create partnership deals that start sharing revenue and not just traffic? And are there any metrics available to track and measure the effectiveness of your syndication efforts? Are all those partners really of equal value to you and any advertisers you bring along?
2:45 PM
Know Thy Audience: Making Data Work For Readers, Advertisers, and the Bottom Line
Long gone is the day of the imperious editor deciding what her reader should know, care about, aspire to. Increasingly, content is following the audience, and that means following the data. Sites are leveraging their analytics in a range of new ways, from reshaping editorial to optimizing the content mix to exploiting search opportunities to re-selling anonymous audience behaviors to third parties. Research can be the center of a publishing business if you know how to mine the right numbers and let them drive both business and editorial models. How can a site extract the most important and valuable data from their audiences and discover the untapped revenue opportunities?
3:30 PM
Coffee BreakLocation: Atrium
3:45 PM
Community Case File: Socializing Your Content
We can’t all be Facebook or Twitter. This year publishers have turned from trying to be social networks to effectively "socializing content,” leveraging audience to enhance the value of editorial to users and advertisers. This session features three case studies involving different approaches: moving video content and advertising onto blogs and third party user-generated sites; moving content and advertising into social networks via applications; and creating compelling social network presence for content in mobile social networks. There are several ways to crack this social media code. We explore three of them here.
4:30 PM
Can Technology Save Publishing?
Content may be king, but in digital platforms will technology solutions provide the ad targeting, data management, content optimization, distribution and monetization mechanisms that really make the models work? We bring together technology providers and content site builders to explore which emerging publishing tools, new tech solution and products are making a real difference in the publishing business. Publishers are besieged with new ad networks, site optimization tools, social media and messaging tools and multiple new distribution platforms. How do they decide which number to place their bets on and expend bandwidth and resources to implement? And is the technology starting to dictate the shape content will take – is the handmaiden usurping King Content’s throne?
5:30 PM
Cocktail Hour
Get together for drinks after the show at the Broadway 49 bar one flight down on the Reception level of the hotel -- cash bar.
