The Media 2.0: How Web 2.0 is Transforming Traditional Media panel at Web 2.0 Expo discussed the implications of Media 2.0 for audiences, content creators, aggregators, and more.
Syndication & distribution, customer acquisition, community moderation and aggregation are all cost reduction aspects of Media 2.0.
Print is slowly being destroyed but it subsidizes a lot of current content creation. The Web has yet to completely fill the needs of advertisers: how do you advertise that you are running for mayor when no one reads the paper?
The Web promotes rising stars more efficiently then other mediums and these stars are stealing readers from mainstream media sites. Stars are a way to bring in an audience.
A whole new range of people are beginning to think of themselves as publishers. As a result, media companies should be increasingly focused on the aggregation & curation of content: present the best things to people at the right place & right time.
Media 2.0 is basically bounded by: user generated content & self-publishing, the aggregation of content via communities & algorithms, and new business models.
There is a lot of room for improvement in online advertising especially for small businesses, brand advertisers (who are not able to get their grand message online), and merchandising.
If you have too much granularity in your audience segmentation, it becomes more difficult to make money as the segmentations don't have enough customers.
Create a virtuous circle: redistribute traffic in a way that benefits aggregators & content creators.
Currently search engines list the conversations about content before the content itself.
Technology driven Media 2.0 companies (alternate views of news, filters) often don't add value. Need to think about final result of content: is it compelling & what does it mean.
Audience development is the most important problem facing us today. Understand who your audience is and what they want.
Search is not an algorithm, it is an editorial choice of content. Search results are not objective.
It is an enormous direct expense to maintain content creators. As a result, media companies have a strong bias toward optimizing content for the bottom line vs. for quality.
A potential future role of media companies is to curate content instead of creating it. If you become the best place for a specific topic, Google will point you to. But you can't only aggregate as news still needs to get written and sometimes the only way to do that is to pay people for it.