A Real Content Exchange System: Searching for (e)Meta Meaning

Take a look at the WSJ story today on News Corp.  Intriguing Street view:  "One knock on News Corp. is that it remains too focused on slow-growth newspapers and television stations. But these businesses generate impressive cash flow..... With shares of new-media companies like Google Inc., eBay Inc. and Yahoo Inc. stalling lately, some investors are beginning to focus on so-called content providers as they begin to sell programming through all kinds of distribution channels, including hand-held devices."

So there you go: If only Old Media could get their acts together and get off their assets, they might find whole new pipelines of revenue.

Of course, there may be a lot of truth in that.  It may be just this odd transition time. The transition may not come soon enough for Knight Ridder -- bids are due March 7 for America's second-largest newspaper company.  Other companies that figure out how to make the transition and sell their stuff everywhere may look back at the early 2000s and smile.  But not yet.

One thing that's lacking is a true content exchange system. What we need is a universality of tagging all news content, and ways to track it wherever it goes. Such a system, a twinkle in a few entrepreneurs' eyes now, would do this:

• Affix the publisher's brand on content indelibly;
• Allow it to flow from publisher to aggregator to distributor to device seamlessly;
• Account for whatever business terms are agreed among those players, with publishers in a driver's seat, if they take the lead with the system. Business rules can be set and revenue splits accounted for.
• Enable paid subscriptions and embedded advertising -- remember that two-legged model? --  as news and info content is aggregated, disaggregated, mixed and mashed, personalized and shared.

I don't think we're on the brink of such a system, but maybe it's getting closer. Take some recent movements. Macrovision recently bought eMeta, the company ably led by Jon Lewin and Chris Miranda (may you both enjoy the fruits of your labors). eMeta's been known as the Cadillac of news-oriented registration/authentication companies. Good technology, not cheap, but underutilized by the news industry. Times Select has used it to build its new paid sub business, but few other publishers have used its robustness ecommece abilities to build new businesses. 

The $35M price tag seemed low. Macrovision may well be making the purchase to bolster its entertainment-oriented businesses, but out of the combo may come more alternatives for the news industry.

Just take a look at its description of the deal in the release, and you can see the wider vision.

In January, Bitpass, a contents payment company, bought Yaga, a perennial underachiever in the paid content enablement space.  Maybe there's a bit of a roll-up going on to a positive end.

Then there's Mochila.com, billing itself on a single page simply as "the online marketplace where members can buy and sell articles, photographs and other content. Please email."  Good luck if you do; they're still in stealth mode.