Hopefully we will see more companies follow this example. It time for them to start thinking about how they can extract value from single articles rather than through their site.

There are tons of great content out there. If media companies dont want to promote their content through apps like Flipboard, Zite, Pulse and & PressJack then they will lose more audience.

What Zite is doing is stealing the content that a news organization either creates through their own resources, or pays for as part of a syndication fee.

For example, if Gannett wants to us the AP news feed for Iowa, they pay an agreed upon $ per month.

Why should Zite be absolved of playing by the same rules?

“There’s an obvious third option, which is to embrace the new possibilities afforded by new form factors and reading habits, and to stop thinking about how to fit a 19th-century business model to the present. And of course, to do it well and charge for it.”

We need to get beyond phrases like “…embrace the new possibilities afforded by new form factors and reading habits…” and start actually getting specific. More than anything, that’s my point. If I was a publisher reading that I’d have no idea of what you think I should actually DO. Could a publisher create something like Flipboard or Zite? Sure. Publishers with a variety of media properties could do that and make it interesting even. Would people pay for it? Some would be something, yes. Would people pay enough to come close to current revenues? I doubt it. Aside from the structure of the payment scheme, look at how many people are saying that $35 for the top tier of the NYT subscription is too expensive. Mind you most of them pay more for their morning coffee… but it’s too much. So, yes, people will pay, but not more than a nominal amount. Netflix? $8. HuluPlus? $5-10 last I checked.

To sum up – I’m not arguing that publishers are doing the right things. I’m arguing that commentators and analysts who decry what they are doing need to stop talking in vague terms or that we all need to admit that the next step isn’t, in fact, all that easy or obvious.

I wrote a blog post on this yesterday to examine the problem in more detail, and explain how News360 is addressing this – http://blog.news360app.com/?p=22

I think the fact that nobody has had any success creating a way to work with the publishers to create a better less-cluttered reading experience that still monetizes well goes to show that there is no “easy” solution. Partnering with specific publishers, as Flipboard is doing, may work short-term, but the large media are still very reluctant to give up control of their content and readers this easily.

New models and technologies (infrastructure really) are emerging to solve these issues for publishers. In this emerging paradigm, publishers can frictionlessly bring in content (full length article, photo and video) from a limitless number of sites across the web. This curation can be fully automated or completely manual depending up the business model and brand goals of a site. This mean that consumers can now explore or discover a potion of the web through the lens of the publisher rather than having to leave the publisher to find all they want. The other side of this coin is that publishers can make the economics of the new digital world work by only monetizing their content from those consumers they can coax to their site at any one time. Publishers must monetize their content where that content is in demand and there is someone willing to both pay for it and follow the guidelines established by any publisher. To accomplish all this two things are required a Digital Curation Platform (enable publishers to curate content in and authorize content out) and a Partner Management Platfrom (enables publishers to fire up or wind down partnerships regarding the use of content with the same ease as accepting a friend on Facebook.

In full disclosure, this is exactly what we have been working on for the past two years with some rather shocking success…. We call it Content Logistix.

Gregg Freishtat
CEO, Vertical Acuity