As a company with “Media” in our name, it was a natural for me to check out the session at Web 2.0 Expo called “Media 2.0: How Web 2.0 is Transforming Traditional Media”. The following is a paraphrased look at what was said in the session.

Here were the participants in the session:

Charline Li - Forrester Research
She follows this space closely and is acting as moderator of the discussion.

Oliver Muoto - vFlyer
vFlyer allows you to create a classified ad with them and then have it posted on hundreds of websites.

Rich Skrenta - Topix
They’re 80% owned by the top newspaper companies in the USA, and these companies are falling apart before our eyes. The internet is destroying these things, and bloggers may think “good riddance to print”, but the problem is that print subsidizes all the journalists, copy editors, graphic designers, local ad salespeople, and more. The internet isn't quite replacing everything it's destroying, at least yet. While this is bad, it also is a huge opportunity for online local advertising to take off. There are millions of local businesses who have yet to advertise online.

Gabe Rivera - Techmeme.com
Techmeme.com aggregates the news and blog posts that are the most interesting to everyone on the web. The media is changing, and some people are uncomfortable with that.

Ted Shelton - PersonalBee/Technorati
PersonalBee was just acquired by Technorati last week, so he’s now the VP of Business Development at Technorati. His view of Media 2.0 is that a whole new range of people are becoming publishers. It's less about creating a content now and more about the best aggregation content. At Technorati they work to make it easy to find this content.

Charlene - How do you work with Google to monetize your media?

Rich - Certain valuable areas of our sites get $40-$60 CPMs, so working with Google has really helped us.

Oliver - We think of Google has this huge gorilla that will inherit the earth, but think back to when Inktomi, Altavista, and Yahoo all seemed insurmountable. There’s still a lot of room for improvement in advertising, it's not always that relevant for some sites. There are so many opportunities to help small businesses still it's amazing.

Ted - Google has done well when you want to buy something online, but nobody has cracked how to really get brand advertisers successful online. We met with one large brand who recently did a social media experiment that got them as much audience as their last Super Bowl ad. For much cheaper.

Oliver - Merchandising is also another opportunity, helping small businesses and others merchandise. Small businsses are looking for these solutions.

Charlene - Brand advertisers want a big audience, and so aggregating an audience is valuable. How do you build a strong audience and how do you build upon it.

Rich - We launched in 2004 after the dot-com meltdown. It was easier to get attention at the time. Nobody had really done content by zip code before, we were going after the long tail geography. The challenge with advertisers is that when you break down advertising to one of these local audiences it isn't that big anymore. We segmented the audience so much that the audience size isn't that attractive.

Gabe - For Techmeme it all comes down to the link. When people create stuff on the web, a natural thing to do is link to someone and maybe have them link back. People find it useful to link to Techmeme to get a full spectrum of a story.

Ted - Our audience is about 10M uniques a month now. People link to us, and bloggers notice us providing traffic to them. We were also early and basically a first mover in this category. Look at some of the newer blog search engines like Sphere, it's very tough to break through the noise today.

Oliver - Audience really means customers. Very few companies have that first mover advantage, so what else can we do. It helps to be a star or be great at marketing. Nobody likes that, but it's the truth. Whether it's PR, viral, or traditional marketing. There are too many Web 2.0 companies out there so it takes a lot of work, energy, and education to get an audience. Partnerships can also help people be successful.

Charlene - All of the big portals have been somewhat successful in Media 2.0, but as you all just said thinking differently and being early in a space is an advantage. Can the big players and traditional media companies compete?

Rich - I’ve spent a lot of time working with big companies and it's just hard to be nimble. Some make heroic attempts, but it's hard. Yahoo has some interesting businesses and groups inside of it like Yahoo Local or Yahoo Groups that allow for some interesting opportunities.

Ted - I’ll refer to the “blue ocean” strategy that means that you work to do something so different that it separates you from your competitors. Innovating by acquisition is something we’ll continue to see, but the companies have to be careful they don't squeeze that new toy and squash it.

Charlene - There are many constraints on time and resources. What's the one thing you focus on? Technology? Content?

Rich - I think both can be successful. Look at Gabe with Techmeme, it's his technology and algorithm that are so good they get an audience. Look at Jason Calacanis with Weblogsinc and Nick Denton with Gawker Media, they focused on their content and the quality of their content to be successful.

Charlene - What about search engine strategy? Has that helped you gain an audience?

Rich - It's a valid model to try and aggregate local content to show up in search results for some city’s local pizza shop. It's a double-edged sword, you want to get your best content showing up, but you don't want to get addicted to it.

Ted - Those are some interesting points. It's also interesting to note that search engines value conversations and you can see the sites with the conversations showing up ahead of the local pizza restaurant's site itself.

Gabe - While my site is technology-driven, it's the audience that really drives it. You don't want to focus too much on technology and be mindful of the content and what it means to the reader.

Oliver - I agree that you need to make sure that your content fits the audience. You also need to know what the content should be based on what the audience wants. Who are they and what do they want? If you have an understanding of your audience it will really help.

Audience - How does advertising fit into all this?

Rich - Advertising needs to continue to get more personally relevant. People will need to keep giving up information to get ads that are better and more interesting to us. It used to be that you could reach 80% of the user market with big loud TV commercials on the networks, and it's just not that way anymore. Users are everywhere in all forms of media, so we need to reach them where they are with relevant ads.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 3:04 am and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.