Strong digital media businesses fuel valuable activity across networks. While the things that media organizations produce can define the brand, what happens as a result of producing an article, some data, a picture, a video, a package of stories, a sponsored message, a retail advertisement is what defines the value of the business. In particular, it’s the generative media platforms that become the strongest. This means that a platform benefits from the actions that their customers, participants and users take and then, crucially, reflects more value back out to them as a result of their actions, encouraging them to do more. I’ll try to use this presentation to articulate what that media model looks like to me. It comes from a bit of experience trying to make such a thing work and from lots of observation across the market over a few years now. In this case, I’m exploring how to tackle it from 3 different points of view. I’ll start with some larger market context. Then I’ll go into a more operational context, showing lots of examples. Finally, I’ll look at how the trajectory sheds light on what the future may hold for this model. Where possible I’ll use examples from what we’re doing at the Guardian to illustrate what I’m talking about, but, to be clear, this is not a definitive strategy, by any means. The full transcript is posted here: http://www.mattmcalister.com/blog/2011/01/04/1730/generative-media-networks-fueling-growth-through-action-introduction/

1. GENERATIVE MEDIA
Fueling growth through networks of activity

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

3. TOPICS
1. Market context 4. Commercial
framework
2. Impacts on
journalism 5. Future
trajectory
3. Practical
examples 6. Conclusion

4. 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

5. Competing on audience
is very hard

6. Distributed platforms are
bigger than ‘properties’

7. 1 Billion
Internet
Users!
(15% of all
people)

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

10. actually, total Internet
activity is exploding
Video
P2P
Web

11. 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?

12. 1T
Google’s Search Index
26M
1B
1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html

13. Twitter Facebook
Tumblr

15. “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

17. WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT
TODAY?

18. Go to where the users are
“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”

19. “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

20. By Andrzej Krauze

21. Photo by D.C.Atty

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

24. THE M-U-S-E FRAMEWORK
An operational model with practical examples

26. Things
Make Use
Evaluate Share
Ideas
Internal External

27. Things that Things that
we make people use
Ideas that Ideas that
we evaluate people share

28. Make

32. Core
Apps Web servers
App
Proxy
App server
App
Memcached (20Gb)
App
App rdbms
App
M/Q
App
CMS
external hosting
app engine etc

36. 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

37. Use

39. Core
Api
Web servers
Solr
App server
Solr
Memcached (20Gb)
Solr Mashery
rdbms Solr
Solr
M/Q Solr
CMS
Cloud, EC2

48. 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
• Partnerspay for access to our people, processes, platforms,
other partners
• Our market share in all the things we offer is strong

49. Share

55. 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
• Thingschange in the world as a result of our work and the
impact of our readers, users, and partners acting on it

56. Evaluate

61. 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.

62. “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

64. 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

65. Make Use
Evaluate Share

66. SOME USEFUL METRICS
MAKE SHARE
• Time to develop, number of people involved • Implicit interests collected from end-users
• Real cost of development • Explicit interests collected from end-users
• Ease-of-use, performance and errors • Number of shares (tweets, RT’s, likes, mailto’s, etc.)
• Aesthetic appeal • Number of referral URLs posted
• Strengths against competition • Number of clicks from shares and referrals
• Weaknesses against competition • Number of comments within our stuff
• Number of comments elsewhere as a result of our stuff
USE • Quality of insights from comments
• Number or amount of things produced
• Number of people using each thing EVALUATE
• Number of repeat uses • Number of articles/posts/pictures/video pitched to us
• Amount of time spent • Cost of acquiring articles/posts/pictures/video, etc.
• Breadth and depth of usage • Amount of information intake
• Supply vs capacity ratio • Cost of data analysis on external inputs
• Number of things purchased • Success rate in surfacing strong signals in the data
• Amount received from buyers • Low failure rate: verifying information
• End-user response to promotions • Low failure rate: accuracy
• 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

67. Decisions based on
value

68. THE COMMERCIAL MODEL OF
NETWORK GRAPHS

73. User
Tag
URL

74. Ad
User
Tag
URL

75. 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

76. Media orgs are
complicated

77. By Nimages DR

79. Generative networks
build value for all those
who participate

81. • 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

82. PATTERNS TO THE FUTURE

83. complexity
Excitement
activity
Frustration ?

85. 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

86. activity
le
sab y
ow or
br ect
dir
complexity

87. activity
h
arc
se ex
ind
le
sab y
ow or
br ect
dir
complexity

88. l
cia
so ers
filt
activity
h
arc
se ex
ind
le
sab y
ow or
br ect
dir
complexity

89. ?
l
cia
so
h
arc
activity
se
ry
to
ec
dir
complexity

90. Photo by maddito

91. WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN?
• New languages form. Learn to communicate in
greater detail and with more abstraction
simultaneously.
• Thephysical world gets reinterpreted. A new “the
world is flat” moment occurs.
• Gettingoff the grid becomes very hard. The new
haves-v-havenots is about being untraceable.

92. complexity
?
activity

93. “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

94. 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.

95. CONCLUSION

97. “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

99. 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.
Photo by Joi Ito

101. “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.”