Because Matt McAllister is moving to London.

Source: FlickrAn example of distinctly not-live blogging. So, last week I went to one of the seminars currently underway as part of the BERR/ DCMS Convergence Think Tank.

What is this thing?, you ask. And, to quote their site, it…

“has been set up to examine the implications of technological development for the media and communications industries, and the consequences for both markets and consumers. It is envisaged that the CTT will have a key role in helping to shape future policy development in relation to these sectors, which include TV, radio, mobile and fixed telecoms and online services.”

Anyway, this particular seminar was titled: ‘Competition and innovation: content and services’. I was asked to be one of the panelists (more on my humble contribution later) but there we three other people speaking who had me scribbling furiously away: Peter Bazalgette, Dawn Airey from ITV and David Pattison from iLevel. What follows is paraphrased bullet points - I’d hesitate to call these direct quotes.

1. Peter Bazalgette giving the keynote on Opportunities and Threats to the content market.

* Talking about the TV market - people want proven product, which means in some markets there is no new product at all. This is good news for the UK and US where people are more willing to take creative risks.

* There is currently raging Anglophilia in the US. Previously you couldn’t get a meeting with major players in the US. Now they’re sending people over here all the time.

* There is a new market emerging in the trading of scripts - just as there is already a market in formats.

* There is real value in the combination of the old and the new - giving the example of the gaming businesses based on Deal or No Deal, and the need to ‘exploit the hell out of properties in the digital universe’

* There’s huge potential to harness the next generation of talent online (ie looking for the funniest clips on YouTube) etc.

* The pace of deregulation around commercial models is too sluggish. In particular he welcomed product placement, but wanted it in place before 2009, and stressed that it should be up to the market to decide how many minutes of advertising ITV should carry each hour, not regulators.

* Mentioned the need for a technical platform for the short form market (OK - my notes get a bit crappy at this point,

2. Dawn Airey - (who just had five minutes)

Echoed a lot of what was said earlier, but…

* Stressed the lengthening value of the food chain in the TV market and expansion in all corners of the world offering new opportunities for UK broadcasters.

* For the UK to sustain success, we need to be clear about the elements of success to date, namely: Anglophilia; High spending per head (I think!!); and competition based on quality.

* Also stressed the importance of existing public service broadcasters who are responsible for 82% of original production in the UK. Online content providers aren’t investing.

* Finally stressed the need for radical thinking and to overthrow current wisdoms…the next few years are going to be about transition as the current financial model is failing. Including the need to think about future revenue models where content is distributed far and wide online.

3. David Pattison (also with five minutes)

* Advertisers are realising that digital isn’t just another media. It is much closer to commerce -and a much greater part of people’s lives.

* Things also happen much quicker with digital advertsing rather than traditional. But his big surprise since joining i-Level has been that with digital campaigns 80% of the activity happens after the campaign has been booked.

* Advertisers will be content providers - get used to it.

* Reputation management has beome a key issue for advertisers

* Stressed again the value of the combination of old and new (giving the example of the Guardian’s growth online); but also new models - eg We7’s ad funded music.

* In terms of challenges - three things. First it’s still not clear how we will build brands on the internet.

* Second - we need to ensure that we keep successful self regulation.

* Need protection from Google who want to disintermediate agencies.

4. And my bit

So, I sat on a separate panel on what should be a regulators response. Not being a regulator, this isn’t my natural territory. But I wanted to make four points.

* First, that we operate in a much broader media landscape these days - where what the BBC or ITV does can have a significant impact on, say a regional newspaper. Our concerns aren’t so much about similar players with similar cost bases, facing similar challenges - but more about global technology players who can leverage their skills into local markets (eg obviously Google) or those operating with completely different commercial expectations - eg The BBC. This has an impact for how people start to see ownership and competition issues. It also means that people have to think beyond the broadcast world as they think of the next wave of public sector ‘broadcasting’

* Second that digital innovation needs to be commercial as well as creative. In other words - it’s all well and good publicly funding cool digital content - but for the health of the UK market and indeed UK plc as a whole,, we need to make sure that the next generation of digital media properties, both large and small, are commercially viable. Again - we need to think carefully about whether any public intervention in the digital market will reduce commercial innovation, rather than spark it.

* Third that the next few years for traditional media owners - in particular newspaper owners - involve a process of painful transition from print to digital - and regulators need to think carefully about anything that might disrupt that process of transformation. My particular example was the launch of a new series of local sites from the BBC, which could be seriously damaging to many regional newspapers online efforts.

* Finally - beyond the world of ownership and competition regulation, there are two areas of law which cause constant challenges to those runnign digital businesses: first the laws of contempt of court; and second some of the legal liabilities over user generated content. Both of which are potentially holding back innovation in the UK.

Back at Seedcamp in the Summer, I met the guys behind what was then a very wizzy little app called Zemanta. They went on to win it, which was great, even though I felt is was a solution looking for a problem. But then, hey - what do I know?

It effectively scanned a piece of copy and then recommended tags for it, looked up relevant pics on Flickr and also found relevant stories from around the web and articles on Wikipedia.

Anyway, this morning, I got an e-mail announcing that Zemanta is now ready to try out. It works as a Firefox plug in and then provides suggestions along side the editing window for Blogger, or Wordpress (yes, even Wordpress when you’re hosting it yourself). The screen grab above gives you an idea of how it looks.

It also has a terribly neat thing - that you can see above where it provides links to Wikipedia articles or company home pages, and you just click ‘Apply all’ and they all get edited in.

It’s terribly neat - and unsurprisingly seems to work much better as your posts get longer.

Definitely worth a try.

Plenty of coverage of GMG stuff recently.

Media Week: GMG looks overseas to open new portals

Evening Standard: Diversify or Die: That is the harsh reality for media firms

SundayTimes: Carolyn McCall has plans for the Guardian Media Group

Just before heading off for Easter, there was a rash of coverage for an Ernst and Young report on ‘the future of national newspapers’. [You can see the E&Y press release here and download the full report here .

The bit that caught my eye was the assertion that eventually got mangled up as ‘we estimate that newspaper websites make between £15 - 20m per year, but they could be making £120m - £250m if they shifted away from a CPM model to more CPC revenues‘.

What they said on the release (and in the clip from the report on the right) was

The CPM (cost per thousand impressions) ad model, used by newspapers online, isn’t generating the necessary growth, according to the report – Media and Entertainment… by numbers. Had the main newspaper websites generated the same revenue per UK unique user in 2007 as Google, which uses a Cost per Click (CPC) ad model, Ernst & Young estimates that they would have earned online ad revenues of between £120 million and £250 million each, just from their UK traffic. But this is hardly the case with many nationals’ total online revenues barely reaching one fifth of this amount.

This is one of those Adam is a man, Adam lives in Reading, therefore all men live in Reading bits of logic. Google uses CPC. Google gets £2.40 revenue per user (according to E&Y calculations), therefore all sites using CPC will generate £2.40 per user.

Anyway, I called Luca the analyst responsible for this who was keen to stress that they weren’t actually saying that we could all increase our revenues by 10X if only we were smart enough to move away from CPM. They were just pointing out the gap..or as they say in the report (which I can guarantee most people won’t actually see).

This gap should be seen as an opportunity for newspapers as it shows that monetising online services in the UK is possible.

Or to be more precise - it shows how monetising the world’s largest search engine and the UK’s largest recipient of ad revenue is possible. Anyway, that’s not quite how it got picked up. EG - this from Forbes

E&Y has calculated that the UK’s main newspaper web sites — The Guardian, Timesonline, The Daily Mail & General Trust and Telegraph titles — could have generated online ad revenues of 120-250 mln stg each in 2007, just from their UK traffic, by charging advertisers on a cost-per-click system.

OK. So let’s be clear - Google’s much higher revenues per user aren’t just because of it operating a CPC model. It helps that those users are actively searching for things and the ads are in direct response to those searches. It also helps to have quite spectacular scale and a completely different profile of activity per user to a newspaper site. It also helps to be active across every possible market. And to operate a hugely efficient demand based pricing model. Oh and having all the power that being the world’s biggest media company kind of helps as well.

We all have CPC elements on our site - either our own deals, or in partnership with Yahoo or Google. I don’t think any of us look at these and think if we were just smart enough to do a whole load more of this, the cash would start flooding in.

In fact - what we have to focus our effort on is doing things that Google can’t do, rather than just aping them. Smarter sponsorship deals. Cross-platform deals. Letting branding ads reach audiences who aren’t specifically searching for anything in particular. Letting advertisers reach specific demographics. The list goes on.

OK. That’s enough. My final thoughts.

1. It’s interesting that in the various bits of coverage, no-one seems to have actually spoken to a publisher to get their feedback on this.

2. Frankly, I think E&Y are being a bit disingenuous - flagging the £120-250m figure and then saying it’s not really what they were saying we could earn..