Growing Demand Blog

Last week’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco made it clearer than ever to me that content is the key to the future of the web.

As part of the event, I participated in a panel entitled “The Future of Content,” where I joined Peter Guber of Mandalay Entertainment and Guitar Hero’s Dan Rosensweig to discuss the direction of content creation and consumption across each of our businesses.  As I said on the panel, I truly believe that content is marketing and marketing is content.  That may sound confusing at first, but it’s actually quite simple.  Creating and distributing relevant content allows companies to engage consumers in ways that traditional advertising-based marketing simply hasn’t.  So instead of pitching users products, we can provide them with meaningful experiences.

Those experiences are so meaningful because our articles and videos are created specifically with consumers in mind.  Rather than follow breaking “news” stories, we commission content based on a person’s needs, which infuses it with great importance because it is relevant and personal to them.  For example, if your spouse has recently been diagnosed with Type II diabetes, an article like “How to Control Blood Sugar with Diet & Exercise” on LIVESTRONG.COM delivers immense personal value.  And our scale enables us to ensure that the content we create adheres to the strictest editorial standards.  Whether solving people’s problems or just satisfying their curiosity, our quality content provides consumers exactly what they’re looking for.

Of course, after you focus on the content, you have to figure out the right ways to deliver it.  As many of the other Web 2.0 presenters discussed, there’s a pervasive uncertainty about the future of content distribution, with both traditional and online media companies struggling through a period of immense change.  At the crux of the debate is the question of who will pay for content: consumers or providers.   As many observers mentioned, several traditional media companies are revisiting old “paid content” models and beginning to charge for their content again.  Here at Demand Media, we believe in a different approach: only creating content that users have already told us they want, and pairing it with relevant advertisers who know they’re reaching exactly the market they need.

And reaching those targeted markets is about to get even easier.  Another big takeaway of the Web 2.0 Summit was that real-time search is quickly becoming next big battleground on the Web. As real-time social media gains momentum, real-time search will allow users to get even closer to the content that is most intimately relevant to them.  And because Demand Media powers more than 3 billion of those social media interactions every month, we’re already focused on the challenges and opportunities that the mainstreaming of real-time search will present.

As I mentioned in my panel at Web 2.0, there are basically three ways that users consume that online content – either they navigate directly to it, they search for it, or they discover it via social media.  No matter which of these avenues users choose, Demand Media is perfectly positioned to deliver the content they want.  That's why from where we're standing, the future looks pretty great to us.

And in case you missed it, here's some video of our discusson on "The Future of Content"...