@We Media: The Grubby Hands-On Business Models Session

This was the “grubby”, hands-on session after all that aspirational, world-changing stuff. It’s is a big panel (maybe too big – six people?!) including Rafat, Dave Sifry of Technorati and Carolyn McCall, CEO of Guardian Newspapers. But the panel was just too big and every time the discussion started getting meaty, someone charged off down another tangent…
The familiar caricatures were of the mainstream media being defensive about their traditional business models, while the new media camp keeps chanting: “If you build it, they will come”. No smoke without fire, although which camp the bankers are in I’m not sure. It’s clear where the money will be eventually but media businesses are very old fashioned, said Sebastian Grigg of Goldman Sachs. He said the fact there is no certainty about where the industry is headed has not been lost on investors. He thinks that advertising needs massive audiences and is worried about the fragmentation of those audiences.
Guardian CEO Carolyn McCall prefers to describe that as segmentation, but says the Guardian has makes loads from its online advertising so the ‘segmentation’ of its audience isn’t a problem.
Technorati’s Dave Sifry revealed his rather smashing “the audience is up to something” video. It’ll be up online soon but the essence is “high up in their glass towers, the media plans it revenge”. It’ll be the next Epic 2014, no doubt.
He said the core unstoppable trends are the adoption of broadband and mobile internet technologies, and the proliferation of tools that enable users to be producers as well as consumers. (The audience formerly known as the audience – they are no longer passive consumers.) As for revenue, Technorati makes money on the traditional advertising model but alternative revenue streams for blogs aren’t being reported. “Bloggers are making money from speaking engagements, from working as consultants, from using their photo blog as a new portfolio that leads to work. This type of revenue is not being reported but it is enormous.”
Other snippets:
— There is no single business model, says GU chief executive Carolyn McCall. The Guardian’s strategy is to be “agnostic” about the media and produce multiple models “that will make us money in the future”. Guardian got credit from Dave Sifry for doing some “very smart things” to make its content easy to find. Carolyn said that GU’s content is blogged often because of its quality but also because it is free.
Chris Ahearn of Reuters thinks a business model will eventually form around micropayments for content.
Dave’s feeling warm and fluffy at the end of the session. He hopes the conference can put to bed the tiresome ‘journalists versus bloggers’ thing. “We need each other!”
I’d love it if that did happen, but it’s just too easy to roll that old line out again the next time citizen media is on the agenda.
(Almost as bad as conferences with no tables are conference chairs with arms.)

This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.

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