| About InfoWorld : Advertise : Subscribe : Contact Us : Awards : Events : Store |
 |
||||
|
||||
 |
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
||||
|
|
|
||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 COLUMN
Sure, content is king, but where does it rank on the value scale? ALMOST ALL ONLINE businesses that produce content sites are struggling. According to a recent Forrester Research report, "The Content Site Turnaround," 80 percent of content sites are not profitable. The biggest hurdle to the success of many of these businesses is that they continue to see themselves as purely content. So, if the advertising revenue model can't support the content site, can the customer?
How's the quality of your site? Would your customers pay for your content? If your customers aren't going to pay hard cash for your content, then what? Online content providers must have an in-depth understanding of their customers. Site registration or content sign-up is typically the best way to build this understanding. And although diversification into other areas such as syndication and commerce are useful to online content businesses, advertising will continue to be the big source of online revenue. Moving forward, it won't be about the number of impressions you can deliver to advertisers, but rather the quality of the audience that you can uniquely target. Mining customer data and delivering quality views to advertisers is the premium goal. So, it stands to reason that site developers must create customer profiles based on rich, explicit, implicit, historical, and real-time data. Marketing programs defined around these metrics will produce results and drive profits. The creation of new measurement standards goes hand-in-hand with these programs, which will help increase accountability, legitimize the medium, and reassure advertisers that they are getting what they paid for -- and then some. Why surrender to the opinions that your content-based business doesn't stand a fighting chance when you can adjust to a business model that's less dependent upon advertising revenue? Internet media has proven itself a winner for both brand growth and direct marketing. Now it is time to create programs beyond advertising revenue that deliver results. An economic slowdown is a grand opportunity to get back to basics and to create new and innovative business strategies. Until now, we've been convinced that everything on the Web can be measured. That's simply not true, unless you're willing to make a sizeable, long-term investment in customer-to-product integration. As a medium, customer-to-product integration programs are much easier to track than others, but they are not magic. It's important that online businesses establish goals based on numbers that carry absolute information, not just how many unique visitors come to your site. We must stop reacting and get creative. BlueMountain.com draws a fee when its greeting-card customers attach a gift certificate from a business partner, such as The Disney Store, eVineyard, 1-800-Flowers, Harry & David, or Mrs. Fields Cookies. BlueMountain.com simply took the step to diversify and get beyond a purely advertising revenue-based business model. Laura Wonnacott is vice president of InfoWorld.com. Send her e-mail at laura_wonnacott@infoworld.com. Now get Site Savvy free via e-mail every other week. Go to www.iwsubscribe.com/newsletters and click Site Savvy.  RELATED SUBJECTS  Web TechnologiesMORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
SPONSORED LINKS
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
