Any Ideas? Data Aggregation: The Next Generation

In a couple of weeks I'll be attending InfoCommerce 2004 in Philadelphia and I'm on a panel with Patrick Spain of HighBeam Research and Meg Shea-Chiles of Thomson Financial. The session is about the changing nature of content aggregation and the implications for content owners. The InfoCommerce people did an excellent job of prepping the speakers - I got a couple of pages of guidelines and "questions likely on the minds of the audience." I haven't figured out my presentation yet but at least two things are becoming clear: 1) Prices for content at the low end will continue to erode, so for aggregators (and publishers) it's important to focus on higher priced content. 2) Content that seems competitive may be complementary and putting together two databases that more effectively meet a customer’s needs can make 1+1=3. An example is EIU + EcoWin creating World Data.

Any thoughts on new aggregation paradigms are appreciated.

Comments

[Pierre Wolff]

Hi Steve,

It looks fm your post about the Go! Conference that the Wikis and blog topics have caught your imagination. Well, these certainly have for me. A good friend is one of the founders of SocialText, another is w/Feedster, and a third w/SixApart.

I've been giving much thought to what it means to have enthuasiasts, experts, generalists, all broadcasting their views, opinions and know-how into the ether. It's also brought me back to the feeling I got when I first saw Mosaic, though I had been playing w/non graphical Web browsers since about 4 months prior. That sense of "wow, any one can be published now...oh yes...oh no" ;-)

Aggregation while important, will also be relagated to the bottom of the content value-chain. It's what is done w/the aggregated content that is where the value will be created and the present opportunities lie. You've heard this before, but it's all about *context*, and how the aggregated content can be contextualized to answer questions quickly and accurately.

During my days at Reuters, I had told the board of directors, that the Net was going to bring about a change in how news is procured and produced, and there would be a shift happening fm centralized news organizations to highly distributed ones. They scoffed, and were basically right because the Web was only a piece of the model. It's been 10 yrs in the making however. Blogs are fullfilling manifest destiny (mine ;-) in this regard. If we only consider two significant examples that have happened in the past week, supporting and exhorting the power of the blogosphere. First, the CBS News forged documents debacle. The defeating evidence and discussions arose out of the blogosphere w/in hours of the announcement and w/in 24 hrs had basically been shown the documents to be fakes. Yes, it took CBS another 48 hrs before they agreed, but still ;-) The other example is that of the latest version of the Krytonite U-Lock most commonly used by messengers. It turns out that a story on a bike blog broke the news that one could force a ball point pen into the key section and twist and the lock would open. This then got picked up by the mainstream media.

The role of aggregators will no longer be simply bringing all of the info to a central and normalized data store, but it will be to provide the tools and services to interpret this information and to help answer revenue generating and/or costly questions in a shorter period of time. Specialization will also likely be required to focus on specific types of problems that an industry faces.

If you look at iPhrase, they're trying to get there in interesting ways in the financial services industry, as is Alacra. But, the blogosphere that's emerging will provide a richness of good (and bad ;-) information that will need to be interpreted quickly and along side the more "professional" sources (a la Reuters et al). The revenue models will be directly related to the cost of the problems being worked on.

Oh, one more example just came to mind. Look at what Majestic Research (Seth Goldstein's company) is doing. They're locking in exclusive rights to data aggreators' databases for a specific market (the 'buy-side') and interpreting the data to provide a income generating advantage to their customers. An arbitrage oppty of sorts. If I know in week 6 of the quarter that Amazon will exceed or never make the numbers they forecasted (on the basis of comScore traffic #s, Majestic's massaging of these, and the avg.$/transaction that Amazon says they have), then I have the oppty to make better trades (generate more revenue) than other hedge funds that don't know this info (as is currently the case).

Seth's biz is predicated on adding value to the databases of aggregators. The aggregators generate a piece of the value-added content sales generated by Majestic. Majestic ends up knowing more about the quality of their aggregator partners' data than their partner does.

The biz model for such value-added services is large annual services contracts, or in many cases a transaction fee (fixed or %) for any trade made leveraging the research provided. Majestic can command significant fees because they are processing the data to the point at which a decision can be made. In the general aggregation model, the normalization only gets you part of the way, the customer still has to do more work before a decisions can be made fm the aggregator's database.

Hope this comment inspires some helpful thoughts.

Cheers,.../p