Are we profiting enough from web 2.0 value-add?
Jinfo Blog

26th July 2007

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Premium online company information and news providers are resisting the challenge posed by Google News and its ilk, registering much improved sales growth in 2006. This is one of the unexpected findings of the annual IRN European Online Information Market report. According to IRN, premium providers have struggled to generate significant year-on-year growth recently. But now they are benefiting from the growing penetration of workflow solutions and specific added-value offerings from the leading content players, such as risk and compliance-related products. Costing £600, more details are available at http://www.irn-research.com/index.php?/main/news/european_online_information_market__1, and there’s a review of the survey in VIP 44 for July – http://www.vivavip.com/vip/. IRN also concludes that premium business content providers are profiting from their perceived value in supporting newer products such as monitoring tools for blogs, wikis, and text mining and analytics tools. In other words, their competitive edge results from the value they can add at analysts’ desktops. Inevitably, Web 2.0 lies behind much of the improvement in their fortunes. Nevertheless Outsell’s analysts clearly believe that business to business publishers have much more scope for improvement yet. So they’ve produced a Web 2.0 Health Test for B2B Publishers. For $695, you can have: a list of companies that have enjoyed Web 2.0 publishing successes and why; a Web 2.0 health scorecard enabling leaders to identify their own organizations’ strengths and gaps in engaging with users; and a list of essential actions and steps for B2B publishers to reap the advantages and minimize the risks of the Web 2.0 environment. Factiva, Hoover’s and LexisNexis are among the established names featured in Outsell’s report – but so are Google and Yahoo! as well as some less familiar names such as OhMyNews (a South Korean offering), Swivel and the Wikimedia Foundation. You can order the report from http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/517. But where do developments such as these leave the beleaguered information intermediary? With algorithms handling the search and retrieval process, and communities of end-users taking over the interpretation and analysis, it looks as if infopros have to adapt still further or die. Add a further $895 to your bill and you can have another recent report from Outsell, The Future of Federated Search – http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/518. Besides profiling 12 companies that offer the service, covering their revenues, number of employees and products, the report also includes useful data on the time knowledge workers spend using external information – and intriguingly explains why federated search players do not view Google as a threat. But the key question with federated search is surely: Who chooses what premium content to have? We could leave it to the search product providers – or we could argue that this is a matter for us as information users and snatch the initiative back.

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