Yesterday morning I attended the ad:tech 2007 keynote panel session entitled “Content is King! (Again?)”. Rather than write a re-cap of the panel, which was moderated by BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine and included Suzie Reider of YouTube, Caroline Little of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, Jason Hirschhorn of Sling Media and Kourosh Karimkhany of Wired Digital (full disclosure, a Bite client), I’ve decided to share a few tidbits I found interesting from the conversation.
Note, the following are not direct quotes (unless there are actual quotation marks) but rather an attempt to paraphrase what was said. Enjoy!
YouTube’s Reider, in talking about content, stated that “commercials are content.” She asked the audience if they agreed, but got little verbal response from what I could gather. She then pointed to the Microsoft Xbox ‘jump-in’ videos on YouTube as an example. In the broadest sense, I guess I’d have to agree that commercials are content…
Hirschhorn, from Sling Media, stated that major media has put way too much time and money into fighting user-generated content as opposed to figuring out how to track and monetize it.
Finally, there was much discussion about news websites being completely unwilling to send visitors off their sites by embedding hyperlinks in stories that lead to other websites. This has long been a pet-peeve of mine and seems to go against the very nature of the Internet. In my mind, the bottom line is if you create valuable, interesting content, people will not only come to your site, but they’ll return, even if you send them off to check-out someone else’s related content. It’ll be interesting to watch how this particular issue evolves over time…
