Navigating the Micro Media Maze
Here are my rough notes from this interesting Chinwag Live event on Tuesday.
Steve Bowbrick
This is an industry driven by hyperbole, and change is always massive, and disruptive. At least micromedia sounds small!Gerd Leonhard
Deal mostly with the issue of control: how can you make money from content if distribution is effectively free. Social networks are becoming the new broadcasters. In the future you'll be adding feeds for music, video as well as for web pages.Most companies are going to be 90% syndicated, as few can afford the investment to create a major brand. Traditional media says control = media. The new guys say attention or trust = money.
Google has this aura of openness, but their core, the algorithm is closed. Microsoft, which used to be closed, is now opening up. So it's not a matter of straight black/white comparisons.
Miles Lewis, Last.fm Europe
Have been at last.fm for 5 months, previously at Yahoo. Last.fm's homepage only has 3% of hits. Most traffic (40%) comes in from widgets, and none of those widgets have been written by Last.fm. We are about music and nothing but music. Taking that chaos of music has become a badge for our users. There was iPhone application within two hours of the iPhone reaching the market. No audio ads at the moment. How many users will bugger off if we add them? Don't know. Expect 50% of visits to be via widgets, some of which have 50,000 users, others have 3.
Mitch McAllister, Product Director, MySpace Europe
The whole genuinely is greater than the sum of the parts. When YouTube widgets first started popping up on profiles, we weren't sure what to make of it. We're expecting to see 50% of our traffic in the future on mobile or non-PC devices.
Neil McIntosh, Guardian Unlimited
Many of us are content creators as well as conduits to an audience. We are run by a trust. Meet audiences where they are. No one wants to be a channel. Issues for us: not just about our need to sell ads, also about context: what surrounds your content.
Umair Haque
I run the Havas Media Lab, a small media consultancy.Wrote a presentation called The Age of Plasticity. When we break things down and remix them, we get productivity gains. That's what micromedia is all about. Last.fm andMySpace have solved real problems, the music industry, which was incredibly shitty. We do ourselves a disservice by speaking of widgets as small and frivolous.I hate the 'monetization' word because you have to create some value before you can capture it. It's not just about shoving more shitty ads down people's throats. We in London think media is entertainment, but it's a hell of lot more.
MySpace should go to advertisers and brands and explore with them how they can reinvent their relationship with consumers; how to turn advertisting into listening.
