Internet brought the information age. The technology that makes content so readily available has also evolved over the years. Utility like access to the Internet has led many to start believing that the content on it is turning into a commodity. I believe it is the other way around. More the content, greater the need for curation, enrichment, relevance and personalization for users. The value of content in the information age will be determined by consumers and producers in a marketplace that is real time.
Today, people depend on the Web to remain informed, entertained, and to connect with those who matter to them. And it?s this content that drives everything, from search to social networks. That?s why the creation and curation of content types such as audio, video, text ? across devices (mobile, TV, internet), social and local ? is more important than ever. And it will continue to be, as the appetite for content on the Internet grows.
Content is also a reflection of real perspectives, opinions and experiences. People want to absorb information that enriches their lives; they want 24/7 access to the topics and conversations they really care about; and they want to experience their passions and interests from myriad points of view. This underlines the need for magnetic content that draws users, who in turn share it voluntarily with others. We have enough examples of videos going viral on the Web. It points to the fact that there is an insatiable desire to produce and consumer more of it.
I see three key stakeholders in the content value chain on the Internet. Producer, Consumer (who in many cases is also producer of content), and the Content Marketplace, similar to what Yahoo! operates.
Yahoo! provides sciences on content optimization, relevancy, and technology platforms on top of cloud infrastructure that can scale and personalize content to provide unique experiences to consumers on the Web. The demand and supply of content moderated by an optimization engine will drive the marketplace and the overall content ecosystem. Consequently, the marketplace will determine the financial value of the content, in real time. Whether consumers pays for the content or an advertiser subsidizes the content for the user is best left to market forces.
Content on the Internet will come through various routes. There is head content, which can either be self-generated or licensed by Internet companies. On the other hand, a significant portion on the Internet today is tail content, often referred to as UGC (User Generated Content). There are now financial models around crowd-sourced content. The emergence of new models is primarily driven by strong local and regional content needs. This is the reason we recently announced the Yahoo! Contributor Network, which we plan to bring to India. It?s an outgrowth of our Associated Content acquisition, and a crowd-source approach to news ? where we bring first-person accounts and analysis from more than 400,000 writers, photographers and videographers.
Technology has a key role to play in this new order. Yahoo! cloud technologies and platforms allow us to run an efficient and scalable ingestion and curation engine. Despite petabytes of data, and millions of sources, the content aggregation and enrichment is real time, encouraging users to discover more. The content optimization and relevancy is a sciences play; and infrastructure like cloud allows scientific models to scale for the Internet. Today because of these technologies, we are able to serve six million homepage versions to our 640 million users. This is a game changer for digital advertising. Content, Context and Creativity are big focus areas for the advertiser. Content engages the consumers, context plays a critical role in relevancy, while Ad creatives provide an immersive experience. Highly relevant and personalized content will driver higher ROI for advertisers. Content optimization will ensure that the consumer sees richer and more relevant advertisements, thus exponentially increasing click-through probabilities. In this new era advertising and content marketplace will help each other to provide higher yield to publishers, maximizing ROI for advertisers and providing true value to content creators. Content and advertising in tandem with cloud platform, sciences and consumer data will provide highly relevant and personalized experience to consumers.
Where there is a choice of content, there is a need for search. However, the next generation search engines need to provide answers, not links. Users type just about 2.2 letters in a search box and rarely go beyond the first page of results. They are increasingly looking for results that understand their search intent, and provide context-based results. Yahoo! has already introduced various search innovations around this philosophy in select markets over the last few months. India will be one of the six markets where we will introduce this in 2011. This will further help the content marketplace.
Last but not the least, content consumption patterns have changed. iPads, tablets are changing the way people consume content, in a way that is very personalized, rich and immersive. This calls for content platforms that can adapt display across devices. Small to medium scale publishers neither have the technology nor the resources to invest in tailoring content for devices like PC, mobile and tablet. But they would love to use a platform that allows them to do the same seamlessly. At the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we launched what we call Livestand. It does exactly what publishers and advertisers were looking for ? content optimization across devices. The early reviews have been nothing short of spectacular.
The broader point is that now is the age for innovation around content, not just in generation, but also in curation, optimization, relevancy and personalization at scale. What we need is a marketplace that allows all the pieces to come together in real time and provides proportionate value to each stakeholder in the ecosystem.
The writer is VP & CEO,
Yahoo! India R&D