| What makes a great digital content business Posted: 18 May 2011 05:47 PM PDT What makes a great digital content business? Pleasing users. CBS Marketwatch.com Founder Larry Kramer makes this point well in this essay in which he argues that pleasing users is most important — it’s what made Yahoo successful originally, why Yahoo has lost its way, what Yahoo and others need to do to succeed now. It’s a remarkable simple and seemingly obvious point, yet enough media companies fail to do so that it’s worth making again, and Kramer does so well… The business has to be obsessed with what it's consumers want and be able to give them that and much more. In fact then need to give them things that they didn't know they wanted. Content consumers ultimately need to be surprised and fully expect their sources of information to be smarter than they are about the topics they are reading or viewing. Content businesses need an editorial intelligence, and personality, built and maintained by a strong team of creative people, whether they are called editors or producers, they need to be obsessed by giving their readers everything they want and much, much more. They need to live for delighting their customers. And they need to include the CEO or someone reporting directly to the CEO. No one reads a magazine, or goes to a play or movie, expecting to see exactly what they want to see. They expect to be surprised, entertained or even educated. The brilliance of a great content company, whether it's The New York Times or Warner Bros. or Harper Collins or The Harvard Business Review or Conde Nast, is that it cultivates and rewards people who can figure out what is about to become interesting before its audience knows. It does that by giving creative people the time and rope, and even the ability to fail, en route to creating great content, whether it's explanatory journalism or a moving and entertaining movie, TV show or Magazine article.
 
 |
