In its five years, the Mesh conference in Toronto has grown into a two-day must-attend event for anyone working in technology and digital media. Mesh 2010 got underway this morning at Toronto’s MaRS Centre and Marketing‘s editorial team was there to post updates to Marketing Daily twice a day and even more frequently on Twitter @Marketing_Mag.
There is a business case to be made for media owners lifting the barriers between content and the audience. At a time when the free-versus-paywall newspaper debate could shape the future of the media industry, Chris Thorpe advocated for the “open” philosophy to a packed house at the Mesh 2010 digital conference.
Thorpe, developer advocate at the Guardian, manages the U.K. newspaper’s content relationships with other organizations. The Guardian not only allows readers access to source documents and content for free, third-party developers and businesses can access it in a number of ways for their own products. Developers can, for example, aggregate Guardian sports scores for an iPhone app.
Thorpe said the paper’s goal is be “mutualized,” not only letting readers behind the scenes to help shape reporting, but finding new ways to make money for advertisers.
The open data and toolset that the paper gives to third-party developers—called the application programming interface, or API—come with certain conditions attached. Developers can agree, for example, to join one of the paper’s ad networks to serve Guardian ads through their service, or agree to profit sharing.
Thorpe mentioned a sports application in Britain that places team-specific merchandise ads around Guardian sports scores and coverage.
“By distributing our content through an API, we can make new businesses out of it. [Developers] get something great, we get exposure to new audiences and we all get to share the money… It takes the Guardian brand further and further.”
When asked by someone from the audience how the open-business model stacks up against the paywall model, Thorpe said he could not provide hard numbers. He did, however, say advertising revenue was “good,” and the paper is researching the new analytics available for the open model.
“What we’ve discovered is the more pages people view, the more likely people click on adverts,” he said, which flies in the face of popular idea that only the newest, flashiest stories get public attention and, therefore, advertiser attention.
“What that suggests is [the website] has to behave a bit more like a print newspaper where we get people to go from section to section… What we’re finding is if we can get people to stay on the site for, say, 10 pages, then the number of click-throughs and the revenue we get from that increases dramatically.”
