This article first appeared in Internet-on-a-Disk #32, December 1999. Comments welcome.
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Investors evaluating the prospects of Internet startups often presume that the value of content is the advertising revenue that could be generated. That approach simply translates to the Web business models from television, radio, and magazines, with different equations for calculating the ad revenue you should expect with a given size of audience. It's easy to understand how that has become common practice -- providing an element of predictability in a realm where very little can be predicted with any degree of certainty.
But that model presumes that content on the Web is similar to TV, radio, and magazine content. And that may not be the case.
Yes, some Web content is lifted straight from other media -- typically magazines and books. And some content is generated based on old publishing models. I call that "crafted" content, to emphasize that it is carefully made and shaped, involving the efforts not just of an author, but of also of one or more editors.
But the Internet also opens the possibility of generating and preserving "spontaneous" content and turning that to value. This is content that is written once and probably not edited, and the creator is probably not a professional communicator. The mode of creation might be email or chat or forums. The flavor of the discussion might sometimes resemble talk radio, but the material can be saved and found by search engines, which opens the door to new and different business models.
Because of full-text search engines (like AltaVista), the static saved content from dynamic online interaction, no matter how impromptu and raw, can draw traffic to a Web site. The more the better.
Basically, spontaneous content brings new visitors, and crafted content brings them back -- because it's clearly written, carefully shaped to meet the needs of the target audience and makes valid and useful points efficiently. And spontaneous content can be used as raw material for generating crafted content. For instance, the raw transcript of a chat session would be spontaneous. An edited chat transcript would be one step closer to crafted. And articles based on that transcript would be crafted.
Also, keep in mind that crafted content is expensive to generate (writers and editors are not cheap), which limits the volume of content available, which in turn limits the number of new visitors that will find that content by way of search engines. So sites that have only crafted content depend heavily on paid advertising to draw new visitors. It's an expensive and risky business model -- trying to create a Web experience so useful and enjoyable and sticky that people will come back again and again, justifying their ad expenditures, because so many of their new visitors become a regular part of their audience, raising the revenue they get from the advertising they sell.
Spontaneous content is very low cost and can be generated in high volume. It is an inexpensive way to draw traffic, and by serving as raw material, it could also help reduce the cost of crafted content.
Examples are hard to come by because, today, most content-based Web businesses don't take advantage of the traffic-generating opportunities of search engines. They typically lock their content up in databases or behind registration procedures that prevent search engine crawlers from ever getting to it.
But the potential is there for businesses based around the generation of large volumes of spontaneous content -- for instance, expert sites that match people with questions to people with answers, like ExpertCentral -- to present that content in indexable form and use it to attract search-engine-driven traffic; reducing their cost of building their audience, and fundamentally changing their business model.
Also, keep in mind, that just as spontaneous content can serve as raw material for new crafted content, crafted content can serve as raw material for "engineered content." In this case, crafted elements are assembled to build large and complex structures that serve new functions -- like bricks assembled into a building. For example, Learnlots.com takes screen-size chunks of content -- that can be quickly read by busy cyber-visitors -- and assembles them into tutorials, and commissions tutorials on target topics to thoroughly cover target subject areas. As a result the material at their site doesn't just inform, it teaches. Also, at a much higher level of complexity, Compaq has assembled many thousands of separate content elements (from technical specs to white papers to decision-support tools) to create ActiveAnswers www.compaq.com/activeanswers which acts as a total system to help partners and customers select, deploy, and manage solutions for complex business challenges.
Basically, with "engineered content," numerous separate elements are constructed, planned, and linked to produce a significant result, where the whole is far more valuable then the sum of the parts. The difference between crafted content and engineered content is like the difference between a course and a curriculum/degree program, or between a single book conceived by an author, and a series of books, like Dummies, covering an entire field and written to a fixed template so the efforts of many different authors or teachers and many different editors or administrators can combine to fill a single business purpose, where independent pieces come together to form a single system which produces predictable valuable results.
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