The Race For Content Online: Quality, Quantiy, Value

This morning Robert Weber left a comment on my post, “Subscribers and AOL revenue” and pointed me to an article in Wired Magazine, “The Answer Factory” – available here: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/

The article got me thinking about content and its central role in business competition online.

Content is the centerpiece of competition online. Whether it’s a search engine, a standalone website (like your local bank or hospital), or a social media platform, content in its many shapes and forms is crucial. Winning the content race requires quality content. Quality content includes but isn’t limited to the following (feel free to add to this list):

Speed – Are users finding the content they want quickly?
Relevancy – Are users finding the content they are looking for?
Cost – How much do users have to pay for the content?
Experience – How pleasant is the user experience when they are consuming content (video, audio, text, games, etc.) Are they bombarded with advertising, pop-ups, etc? Is the content easy to navigate? Are there interruptions while consuming the content (commercials, stalls during video streaming, etc.)?
Reliability – Is the content trustworthy and factual?
Auditing – Are measures put into place to kick out misleading, illegal, and annoying content?
Timeliness – Are users finding the most up to date information?
Presentation – Is the content well presented, spelled correctly, easy to understand, trustworthy, etc.?

Players in the online content race seem to be focusing on making content cheap, helping people find it fast, and providing information on any topic. In my opinion, where many of these companies fail is in providing quality content in the top ranking search results.

Some players claim to focus on providing quality content, but in reality they are really focusing on popular content and giving the highest bidder the power to be #1 in search results no matter how relevant their content is to the user’s interest.

I like the idea of companies like Demand Media giving writers, editors, and filmmakers the opportunity to make money on their content contributions; I think this creates competition that can have a positive impact on the quality of content submitted.

http://www.mahalo.com/ another site, where content contributors can monetize their content has a compelling model as well.

Mahalo’s description at their website reads, “Mahalo is a human-powered search engine and a knowledge sharing service, helping people on the Internet quickly find the best possible information on any topic. Members of the public can also earn money by contributing to Mahalo topic pages or by answering questions on the Mahalo Answers system.”

Wolfram Alpah is another search engine with a niche approach to quality search http://www.wolframalpha.com . This site aims at “Making the World’s Knowledge Computable” by leveraging built in algorithms to compute an ever growing collection of world data. For example you can answer computable questions as simple as, “what is 4 divided by 2” to complex questions like “what is the probability of getting a full-house in poker” see the answer here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=probability+full+house

It will be very interesting to observe the impact that community driven content sites/search engines have on the future quality of content available online. Real-time search and evolving search algorithms will shake things up as well. At the end of the day, quality will be just as important as quantity in the online content race.

Subscribers and AOL revenue

AOL has had a downturn in revenue in comparison to last year. It appears that much of that downturn is attributed to AOL subscribers leaving AOL in droves. So where are those subscribers going? Why are they going away? Will the advertising dollars that were being pumped into AOL for their subscribers be redirected to other companies with traffic? If so where. . .