GENERATIVE MEDIAFueling growth through networks of activity

http://www.flickr.com/photos/heliopaz/2007012694/

TOPICS

1. Market context

2. Impacts on journalism

3. Practical examples

4. Commercial framework

5. Future trajectory

6. Conclusion

TECHTONIC SHIFTS

• More people online, increasing usage, connecting

• Client software, tools for creation, standards battles

• Distribution methods, points of control, platforms

• Connecting the real world, devices, location

• Following the cashflow, new revenue streams, companies

• Changing behavior, new norms, rules, regulation

Competing on audience is very hard

Distributed platforms are bigger than ‘properties’

1 BillionInternet Users!

(15% of all people)

“the notion of the Web as the ultimate marketplace for digital delivery is now in doubt.”

Web

P2P

Video

actually, total Internet activity is exploding

HAVE WE CHANGED, TOO?

•What have we done to be a part of that growth?

•What’s different about what we do today compared to 2-3 years ago?

•Who has benefitted from these changes?

1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

26M 1B

1T

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html

Google’s Search Index

Twitter Facebook

Tumblr

“An application that doesn’t leverage the power of the cloud is not interesting. It’s going to be too narrowly defined.

Why the mobile phone? Because it’s the high volume endpoint. It’s more human. It’s more interactive. It’s more dynamic. It’s more personal.

It’s a principle of Mobile First.

Now our top engineers are developing products for devices first.”

- Eric Schmidt, February 2010 @ MWC

WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT TODAY?

“In the new distributed world you want to be where the people are.

The media brand is less a destination and a magnet to draw people there than a label once you’ve found the content, wherever and however you found it.”

- Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine, “APIs: The new distribution”

Go to where the users are

“Our most interesting experiments lie in

combining what we know with the experience,

opinions and expertise of the people who want to participate rather than

passively receive.”

Alan Rusbridger, Cudlipp Lecture 2010

By Andrzej Krauze

Photo by D.C.Atty

“Journalism without effect does not deserve the special place in democracy that it tries to claim”

Jonathan Stray

THE M-U-S-E FRAMEWORKAn operational model with practical examples

Make Use

ShareEvaluate

Thi

ngs

Idea

s

Internal External

Things that we make

Things that people use

Ideas that people share

Ideas that we evaluate

Make

App server

Web servers

CMS

Memcached (20Gb)

Core

M/Q

App

App

App

App

App

App

Apps

Pro

xy

external hostingapp engine etc

rdbms

WE KNOW WE’RE DOING WELL WHEN...

• We make things quickly and cheaply

• The things we make perform well, have acceptable errors

• We make interesting, creative, groundbreaking things

• Our work is of a high standard, considered better than most competitors

• The amount of what we produce is sufficient for demand

Use

App server

Web servers

CMS

Memcached (20Gb)

Solr

Core

Solr

Solr

Solr

Solr

Solr

Cloud, EC2

M/Q

Api

rdbms

Mashery

WE KNOW WE’RE DOING WELL WHEN...

• People buy our paid-for products and see our free products

• We receive a high value subsidy for what we offer

• People dive into our products and spend time with them

• Partners use our stuff, and they are making money as a result

• Partners pay for access to our people, processes, platforms, other partners

• Our market share in all the things we offer is strong

Share

WE KNOW WE’RE DOING WELL WHEN...

• People both implicitly and explicitly indicate interests in things

• They spread our work through their social nets. Their social actions result in more actions from those connections.

• They participate in conversations we trigger and add to them with their ideas, both within and away from our products.

• They actively contribute by giving or selling us material to evaluate and then make things

• Things change in the world as a result of our work and the impact of our readers, users, and partners acting on it

Evaluate

The cost of flying the British (and other) flags: £95,506, as reader Sam Keir points out.

A spokesperson for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said it was responsible for providing and managing the flag-flying services for ceremonial state occasions, including state visits, trooping of the colour and special flag days, for example Commonwealth Day, UN Day and Europe Day.

“It's going to be about poring over data and equipping yourself with the tools to analyse it and picking out what's interesting. And keeping it in perspective, helping people out by really seeing where it all fits together, and what's going on in the country.” - Sir Tim Berners Lee

WE KNOW WE’RE DOING WELL WHEN...

• We see important trends early, generally before the competition

• People with important information share it with us directly

• We are good at verifying information, recognizing it’s value and knowing what to do with it

• We are honest and fair in our assessments, and the market validates that view

• We are accurate and truthful by most objective standards

Make Use

ShareEvaluate

SOME USEFUL METRICSMAKE• Time to develop, number of people involved• Real cost of development• Ease-of-use, performance and errors• Aesthetic appeal• Strengths against competition• Weaknesses against competition

USE• Number or amount of things produced• Number of people using each thing• Number of repeat uses• Amount of time spent• Breadth and depth of usage• Supply vs capacity ratio• Number of things purchased• Amount received from buyers• End-user response to promotions• End-user conversion rate on promotions• Amount received from advertising promotions• Number of partners using our stuff in their stuff• Revenue partners are earning from using our stuff• Amount partners are spending to use our stuff• Market share: end-users• Market share: partners

SHARE• Implicit interests collected from end-users• Explicit interests collected from end-users• Number of shares (tweets, RT’s, likes, mailto’s, etc.)• Number of referral URLs posted• Number of clicks from shares and referrals• Number of comments within our stuff• Number of comments elsewhere as a result of our stuff• Quality of insights from comments

EVALUATE• Number of articles/posts/pictures/video pitched to us• Cost of acquiring articles/posts/pictures/video, etc.• Amount of information intake• Cost of data analysis on external inputs• Success rate in surfacing strong signals in the data• Low failure rate: verifying information• Low failure rate: accuracy

Decisions based on value

THE COMMERCIAL MODEL OF NETWORK GRAPHS

UserTag

URL

UserTag

URL

Ad

HOW IT COULD WORK

•target ads to users based using profiles data

•adjust messaging to match content of page

•make it happen in real time

Media orgs are complicated

By Nimages DR

Generative networks build value for all those

who participate

• Our information technology ecosystem functions best with generative technology at its core.

• Generativity instigates a pattern both within and beyond the technological layers of information technology ecosystem (generative devices can actually lead to generative content-productions systems, like Wikipedia, for instance).

• Proponents of generative systems ignore the drawbacks that attend generativity's success at their peril

PATTERNS TO THE FUTURE

com

plex

ity

activity

ExcitementFr

ustr

atio

n

?

SUCCESS PATTERN

1. create a new layer of activity that simplifies the complexity in the network

2. commercialize access to or on top of that activity

com

plex

ity

activity

browsable

directory

com

plex

ity

activity

browsable

directory

search

index

com

plex

ity

activity

browsable

directory

search

index

social

filters

com

plex

ity

activity

?

directory

search

social

Photo by maddito

WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN?

• New languages form. Learn to communicate in greater detail and with more abstraction simultaneously.

• The physical world gets reinterpreted. A new “the world is flat” moment occurs.

• Getting off the grid becomes very hard. The new haves-v-havenots is about being untraceable.

com

plex

ity

activity

?

“Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace,

abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.”

- Marshall McLuhan, 1964

THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

• Visual language: Report the experience of a live event without using either words or photography.

• Working off-grid: Get a quote remotely from a source in a way that is 100% untraceable by anyone ever.

• P2P distribution: Find 1,000 readers for a story without publishing it through any kind of commercial entity.

CONCLUSION

“We are still learning how to deal with a medium that is more than uni-directional and thrives on collaboration more than it does on competition.”

- Jon Paton, CEO Journal Register

Photo by Joi Ito

These changes show the emergence of a new information environment, one in which individuals are free to take a more active role than was possible in the industrial information economy of the twentieth century.

“In order to take territory you have to be taking territory from someone else.

But I think one of the best things is, we’re building real value in the world, not just

taking value from other companies.”