The E-Business Software Weekly is a series profiling trends and developments in software and applications that support e-business, the Internet, and other electronic communication channels. Look for a new story each week in this space.
The Autumn of Dis-Content
It should have worked.
The content venture, launched with great fanfare less than a year earlier, was headed by one of media’s most successful entrepreneurs. It had won the financial backing of an A-List of corporate investors, including CBS, General Electric, Primedia (a leading specialty publisher), and Microsoft. And it had recruited an equally stellar roster of writers and editors, among them former New York magazine editor Clay Felker, playwright Wendy Wasserstein, and celebrated writer George Plimpton.
The venture, of course, was an Internet property called Contentville,” the progeny of media mogul Steve Brill, founder of Court TV, American Lawyer magazine, and Brill’s Content magazine, and it closed its virtual doors on September 30. Two weeks later, Brill’s companion print book, Brill’s Content, ceased publication, and a related Primedia property, Inside.com, was stripped of its original industry insider” content and instead transformed into a static gateway into Primedia’s other publications, including American Demographics, Folio, and Cableworld.
The Brill and Primedia universes aren’t the only media suites undergoing catastrophic collapse, however. The Industry Standard, at one time a leading chronicler of the Internet economy, shut down both its print publication and Web site in September, along with Media Grok, a companion publication. Upside, a similar San Francisco based magazine, terminated its print publication and Web site at about the same time, conceding that its parent company had run out of money. Business 2.0 and eCompany Now, two other leading e-business magazines, merged this past summer, with the former’s print publication and the latter’s Web site surviving under the Business 2.0 banner.
Also this past summer, Access Magazine, a consumer-oriented Internet and personal technology magazine inserted, like Parade magazine, into Sunday newspapers, suspended both its print publication and Web site while awaiting further funding. And in the highest-profile closure, albeit in a different vein, Conde Nast this month ended the 66-year run of Mademoiselle magazine, whose circulation of 1.2 million proved not to be enough to defray a decline in advertising pages, down 17.6% during the first eight months of 2001 over the comparable year-earlier figure.
The Demise of Contentville
Among them all, however, the demise of Contentville was perhaps the most notable, if for no other reason than the fact that it represented what the Internet was supposed to be about: content. And, indeed, Contentville included one of the richest collections of content on the Web, its offerings encompassing mainstream books, e-books, out-of-print and hard-to-find books, magazines, magazine article archives, television news transcripts, study guides, screenplays, newsletters, legal documents, research reports, speeches, and dissertations. Lists of all of these publications and documents were freely searchable, and most of the actual documents were available online for a nominal fee, ranging from about $2 to $10.
Unfortunately, for both Brill and admirers of this rich reader’s resource, people weren’t buying. About this, Brill made no excuses. Despite the great work of the Contentville staff and the great support we had from our partners,” he wrote to the Web site’s departing employees, my idea for Contentville just didn’t work.” The problems, Brill admitted, went deeper than the faltering economy and decline in advertising, which had doomed Mademoiselle and others. And Contentville, unique in many respects from other content-centric Web sites, did not suffer from the surfeit of sameness that helped to kill off The Industry Standard, Upside, and eCompany Now.
Rather, Contentville’s demise, like that of so many other Internet-based companies, resulted primarily from an adventurous but ultimately flawed business model. As journalist Mick O’Leary described the company’s strategy in the March 2001 edition of Information Today, Contentville’s stated mission is to gather quality content-regardless of type-shaped by the contributions of outstanding journalists and writers. Contentville’s model is not a database or a research service, but is instead a small, independent bookstore-an eclectic and idiosyncratic collection shaped by the knowledge and informed taste of its owner.”
The customer value of this model notwithstanding, the Contentville Web site was, in many ways, weakly executed. O’Leary notes that, even at its peak, the site itself [was] very poorly designed. Pages are too cluttered and too long. Departments are not clearly identified by page layout or captions. Ads are difficult to distinguish from content. Searching and browsing are just adequate. Documentation-in every sense of the word-is terrible or nonexistent. Names of content categories are misleading. Introductory remarks for each section are vague and incomplete. There are no help sections for content areas. There is no site map. And, most frustrating, the sources of the content, with a few exceptions, are unnamed.”
Searching for An Audience
Still, even a well-designed Web site would not likely have kept Contentville in business. O’Leary remarks that Contentville was basically an aggregator, and most of what it collects is ordinary. Its third-party content can be found elsewhere, in proprietary services or Web sites.” For instance, its book list came from wholesaler Ingram, the same company that supplies Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Its out-of-print book section was a private-labeled gateway to Alibris.com, the Internet’s leading antiquarian book dealer. The study guides could be found on CliffsNotes.com. The magazine articles came from the EBSCO database, used by a number of other article-search services. The research reports, provided by Icon Group, were a partial selection of what was available on other market research sites. And the dissertations section, operated in partnership with UMI, offered only truncated abstracts rather than the full versions available directly from the UMI database.
As a result of these shortcomings, Contentville went part way down a number of roads without reaching the final destination on any of them. Unlike Amazon, which created, perfected, and richly elaborated upon a new bookselling model before moving onto a range of other products, Contentville did a number of things passably, but nothing (except for some of its original content) exceedingly well. Like a vast number of rapidly imploding Internet portals that aggregated undifferentiated content in an unexceptional way under a global brand banner, Contentville tried to create a category-killing presence on the cheap, repackaging the resources of others without adding (and often subtracting) real value. Whereas Amazon supplemented its largest-on-the-Web book inventory with a wide array of reader reviews, pinpoint-accurate collaborative filtering, and one-click buying-none of which had ever been deployed so skillfully in the retail book sector before-Contentville offered a Citizens Club” that gave buyers a 5% discount on purchases, and that was about it. (Contentville’s one key innovation-book-buying recommendations from a small cadre of subject experts-paled next to the online commentaries from Amazon’s thousands of reader-reviewers.)
Ironically, Brill’s print publication was plagued by a similar lack of value-add. Although vexed by a series of management changes and a souring of Brill’s relationship with Primedia, the core problems were more substantive. Writes Seth Mnookin in one of the final editions of Inside.com: Brill’s Content will go down as an occasionally preachy, often confusing, but sometimes fascinating publication that never quite found its niche. It aimed to be a consumer title about the press in the same way that Sports Illustrated aimed to be a consumer title about sports, an ambitious plan done in, perhaps, by the fact that people don't tend to gather at stadiums to root on their favorite media outlet.”
Comparatively tiny Access Magazine, whose final, greatly trimmed-down issue was delivered in newspapers this past June, offered a cascade of original content, including several pages each week of concise best of the Web” reviews of Web sites in a variety of different categories. The company clearly intended its publication to become the Parade” of the Internet economy, but as with Brill’s Content, its publishers failed to realize in their exceptionally well-executed enthusiasm that newspaper readers do not thirst for information on their favorite Web sites as much as they do for the celebrity, slice-of-life, and health and finance features offered by Parade. For convenience, Access Magazine did archive its weekly reviews on the publication’s Web site, but the layout was hard to scan and difficult to use, depriving the archive of the value that it otherwise might have had. (The company did publish two easy-to-use book-length compilations of its Web site reviews.)
Value and Execution
The collection of experiences described above yields two important lessons, not just to publishers but to e-commerce ventures of any kind that attempt to use content either to attract an audience or to generate direct-sales revenue. First, the content offering must add substantial value over and above what is available elsewhere. Merely repackaging a small collection of content from other Web sites delivers little of worth to potential customers when those other sites are literally just a click away-as a large number of would-be B2B exchanges also have discovered over the past year. Second, the content offering must be genuinely interesting and relevant to the target audience. Indeed, one of the less obvious reasons for Contentville’s failure was that many of the kinds of content offered on the site appealed to a very narrow segment of the population; while such a model nevertheless could have survived (there are countless niche retailers, both online and off, for instance), it would have required a much less ambitious vision than what Brill had in mind.
To be sure, there is little that either publishers or online merchants could do to counteract the cyclical declines in advertising and sales like the ongoing trough that has spelled the end of ventures ranging from upstart technology publications to grand dames like Mademoiselle, and in a field as crowded as the former once was, a maturing of a sector almost always means consolidation or collapse of less viable entities. Particularly on the Internet, at least for the foreseeable future, there is likely to be considerable churning, and because of the financial immaturity of so many Web-based firms, economic slowdowns are likely to place more of them at risk than in the offline sector.
Still, as the economy returns to life, new ventures will surely arise to take their place. Witness, for instance, the recent success of Orbitz in the once declining online travel field, and note that, even while The Industry Standard, Upside, and eCompany Now have disappeared, Red Herring, Business 2.0, and Fast Company endure (at least for the time being). But as in any commercial field, the success of these and other Internet-focused properties struggling to survive will depend upon three key factors. Understanding one’s customers. Taking them seriously. And delivering real value.
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