The Oxford Knowledge Company

For years you’ve made money selling people news; more money by selling people news about only things which interest them; and even more by delivering the whole caboodle electronically. Then someone does all of this and charges precisely zilch. Welcome to the magically morphing models of the online information business.

 

Think fast. You must, just to keep up with the pace of change. Last month’s grinning CEO mugshot announcing a cheaper, pay-as-you-go news service is replaced by next month’s cherubic, quasi-teenage CEO from the latest upstart to offer the same thing for free. Or that’s the way it seems to the casual reader of business news. You have to know the market well to know the difference and to be able to make valid judgements.

Let’s take a look at the history here. The first hot thing in online web-based news was that there was some. Reuters, BusinessWire and AP all being available free through Yahoo! News from the early days of the web portal. NewsEdge’s NewsPage and NewsAlert were among the first to offer free customised news and news alerts into your email box. They followed the time-honoured (for all of four years) Internet content publishing tradition that ‘some’ is free and ‘more’ costs. So far, so unthreatening. Most large companies took a while to start asking themselves why they were paying so much for customised newsfeeds when they would get it for so much less if they went with one of these newer vendors.

Then came the spectre of ‘push’. This was the hot model of 1997. The most high-profile of these was Pointcast which, at one time, was allegedly valued between $350 million and $450 million. But it turned out that while one Pointcast user could be happy, a whole network of them were distinctly unhappy, as the speed of their network had been reduced to that of treacle-wading. Pointcast’s management missed the boat as the bidders wised up; and the company was sold last year for $7.5 million.

‘Push’ was going to change everything. You’d only have to put yourself in the box and you’d be assured that all the news you ever wanted or needed would be arriving on your browser or email box, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Meanwhile, two new players joined the market for ‘intelligent news delivery’: Wisewire and Autonomy. Boasting advanced neural-net technology, Wisewire invited you to create ‘wires’ which searched for content and delivered the results into a browser. Autonomy Daily Briefing promised similar benefits, using different technology. Several colleagues and I tried them, but rarely had better news results than you’d get from a simple search on NewsEdge’s NewsPage.

Lycos acquired Wisewire for almost $40m and for a brief time trumpeted the Lycos Web Guides, which were produced with Wisewire technology. How successful were they? To answer that it might be interesting to look at Lycos’ more recent licensing of the Netscape Open Directory, a Yahoo!-like web directory compiled by volunteers and freely available. In addition, www.wisewire.com takes you to Lycos, where you would be hard pushed to find any mention of Wisewire. Autonomy abandoned the Daily Briefing and concentrated on their server-based knowledge management products.

NewsEdge continued to sign up large corporates to its flexibly priced news delivery products. You had to wonder though ... how many of those individuals couldn’t receive almost the same benefit by bookmarking the freely available NewsPage Industry News on the topic of your interest? Ah, the reliance of business on consumer ignorance.

Having failed to get people to pay for news from their site, FT.com and Reuters finally went free to registered users. So now the free news connoisseur had more choice, bearing in mind that delicate differences in the bouquet of each service stemmed from the slightly different news sources used in the mix. Meanwhile, NewsPage acquired a new brand name and high profile launch as Individual.com, a free individualised Internet service. Different names, but the same business model of free news being used to buy advertising eyes, ‘loyal’ registered unique users and — maybe — even selling premium content to people who were hooked on free content.

Enter Moreover.com, a UK start-up which has resurrected the Wisewire concept, with one intriguing twist. Where Wisewire charged for use of its content-seeking ‘wires’, Moreover.com encourages members to choose from a wide source of industry-classified news and incorporate it into their own web sites, for free.

Affiliate marketing is the latest business model. It means that even those on tight budgets now have access to more news than they can digest. Are we all going to be as well-informed as each other? Where’s the competitive edge? Edwin Bailey, a commissioning editor at Financial Times Business, observed: "It seems likely that most web news will be free and funded by advertising. The competitive edge will come from services that offer analysis and insight. The main problem with the web is that the basic facts are there but no questions are answered. Sites like FT, Wall St Journal, Reuters and so on are likely to be the most successful in the long term because they add value and have the best journalists et cetera and, ironically, will select the ‘real’ news to avoid information overload."