Content is King... again

By Allan Maurer

RESEARCH TRIANGLE, NC – “Content is King,” is an idea that has had its ups and downs as a guiding principal for developing not just traffic but value on Web sites, but it is clearly back in the forefront. Yahoo recently agreed to buy Associated Content, which relies on more than 300,000 low paid freelance contributors to churn out 50,000 pieces of unique media monthly, paying $100 million for the company.

The Examiner.com, a similar operation recently bought NowPublic, a Vancouver-based citizen journalism site and continually advertises for “Examiners” to provide content on news, restaurants, entertainment and other topics nationally.

AOL recently announced its intention to hire hundreds of journalists, editors and videographers in addition to the 500 full-time editorial employees it now has, David Eun, president of AOL’s media and studios division told Crain’s New York Business.com.

“Our mission at this company is to be the world’s largest producer of high-quality content, period,” Eun, said.

Content hot again

Bob Butler, CEO and founder of BestThinking.com, a rather unique Research Triangle, NC-based content site, has predicted the content space would become hot again even before the Yahoo/Associated Content deal was announced.

The Triangle region, he notes, is home to a number of content oriented Web businesses in addition to his own, including www.BrightHub.com and www.Lulu.com, while many other content driven Internet companies dot the entire Southeast region. Butler tells us he thinks well run content sites will be delivering a good return on investment if they land venture dollars.

“This is Yahoo’s answer to what AOL is doing with Seed.com… basically acquiring their own internal freelancer-driven content website to reduce content costs and increase content volume,” Butler tells us.

“In any event, this clearly shows an increasing demand for ventures that can generate content for major media and their Internet offerings,” he adds.

Barrier to entry lower

Why all this renewed hoopla over content? For one thing, the barrier to creating an Internet company is, as Edwin Warfield, founder of Localbusiness.com (originally dbusiness.com) that thrived during the Internet boom years, much less now than it was then.  Now founder and CEO of Potomac-based Citybizlist.com,  Warfield tells us “It costs less than 5 percent of what it did then.”

So many more Internet sites are competing for traffic and search engine notice and getting original, unique and frequent content on a site is the reliable way to attract both search engine attention and visitor traffic, which translates into advertising dollars and a firm’s eventual worth.

We suspect that successful content-focused sites will gravitate more and more toward professional contributions rather than the type of low-paid, search-geared material now offered by Associated Content and Examiner.com.

A corollary of the renewed interest in building sites through content is a renewed interest in content management systems. We’ve used half a dozen in our decade of providing content to a variety of Web sites, and here’s a bit of advice: talk to some professionals in the content management space before you decide on a CMS.

The right CMS will have a lot to do with whether your subject matter experts or other contributors publish regularly.

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