I particularly like slide 15 on vision, slide 26 on poker and slide 47 on THNX.

Efficiently delivering your product will mean it is built to be Small, Simple and easily Shared. These pillars can form a foundation to re-evaluate what you are trying to achieve and what the future holds for your product and business.

Small: Look at the most high profile web business of the year, Twitter, it sets out to do one thing well: it broadcasts small messages accross multimple platforms. It doesn’t try to over complicate its proposition and becuase of that it has been massively sucessful in growing an engaged audience.

The publishing industry should look at web businesses like Twitter for operational inspriation and slim down their offering so it is focused, reliably delivered and offers users multiple touch points, which they control. Concentrate on your core verticlals and break them out into separate websites if nessessary.

Simple: The more complicated you make your product the less likely an audience are to identify with it. They are also not likely to return regularly if they dont know what they are going to get.

Look for ways to slim down and lose sections that you don’t maintain regularly. This will make your product simple to maintain from an editorial point of view and simple to access from an audience point of view. The time saved by this simplification will free up your editorial team to focus on delivering your audience what they actually want, more regularly.

Shared: This is possibly the most difficult to implement but also the most important in order to build an audience that are engaged with your product and actively want to engage in helping you grow your audience.

Facebook Connect and Twitter API integrations are going to be massive in 2010. They will help grow an engaged audience for your content and strengthen your brand.

Being “Small” and “Simple” does not mean you will dumb down and lose out. It will mean that you are refined and easy for your audience to identify with. This will strengthen your brand and grow your audience.

This simplification isn’t easyily attainable and carries a new set of challenges, it does however allow you to try out new ideas and find a clear path down which you can grow your product, audience and business over the next decade.

Active engagement is the next step in the development of the web. Users will become increasingly involved in carrying out an action or process in order to reach the content they desire and engage with it, this is Active Engagement.

Active Engagement can be for example implementing and RSS feed into your net vibes account, defining the parameters around which that RSS feed will display and then visiting the content that is flagged up for them.

An actively engaged audience is more connected to the network and it means more to them than a passive engagement.

These theories have more development to go but this is the basis.

As options increase for users as to where they will invest their time online it will become more important to create lasting and connected relationships. This will maintain and build the amount time they choose to invest with our digital products

The development of the web so far is as follows.

Web 1.0 – Narrowband
Download

Web 2.0 – Broadband
Download
Upload

Web 3.0 – Broaderband
Download
Upload
Automation/Active Engagement

Web 3.0 will add an element of automation into the media we consume. There is an ever-expanding plethora of online content, which we do not have the time to both find and digest. Based on our personal consumption habits, profile and geographical location content will be automatically selected for us without even requesting it. This will be done through the RSS feeds we choose to subscribe to and the information we have previously engaged with.

At the moment if a breaking news story develops we will not know about it until we turn to the right channel or go to the right website. Converged digital platforms are starting to deliver these sorts of announcements to us based on the options we have chosen or the media we have engaged with prior to the event.

In this web 3.0 world of automated personal recommendations the user, content provider and advertiser benefit. Users will receive content they will want to access, the content provider will be able to invest in popular content and deliver it to the correct audience thus maximising the value of investment in it’s generation and advertisers will be able to effectively target appropriate advertising to the user. Everybody wins.

Example: Amazon.co.uk

Every time I visit Amazon I get presented with “New for You” and “Customers with Similar Searches Purchased”. They are actively engaging their audience in order to boost sales based on a prior interaction. It’s brilliant and blindingly obvious.

If I for example go to FHM.com and I have previously looked at the “Games” and “Girls” sections and ignored everything else next time I go to the site it should recognise that and present me a “New for you on FHM.com” at the very top on the page in clear view. I will see straight away the exact content I want to interact with. I will therefore be much more likely to get off the homepage and start exploring the site.

Imagine if you could do this for readers of magazines. Tailor the front page so for every single reader they get shown the exact things that will make them buy the magazine!!

The amount of times an advert serves would seem looking forward fairly irrelevant for an advertiser. It is the relevance the advert has and the time on screen that is most important. If an advert serves 10,000 times but the user only ever sees the first 2 seconds of the advert then a campaign is not going to have a discernable ROI for a client. Surely what is more important with rich media adverts is the length of time they have been displayed to a user for.

- Display adverts are increasingly using video and graphical content without the expectation that people will click the advert. For example the recent Burnout adverts were all about showing the user a video ad. This is an increasing trend and one that will continue.

Google have been massively successful with their pay per click directional advertising because their users encounter their adverts while they are searching for a related subject. They are dynamically displayed to the user. It’s not based on showing them and unsolicited advert they might like. Users will be very likely to click their adverts because they are appropriate to the content users are searching for.

We are in the business of displaying unsolicited adverts to users that are however appropriate to the landscape of content available on our websites. In order to make them meaningful lifestyle messages the entire message must be given AET in order that the user consciously or subconsciously digests the message.

If we actively seek to develop a system that increases the amount of potential AET then we could look at serving adverts in a different way.

- Advertisers should be able to specify a length of AET that they want from their adverts. As adverts are predominantly flash based when the advert has finished playing the flash advert should automatically load a new advert without having the page refresh. This will have more of an impact on a user and maintain ad impressions whist improving the user experience

- This might work well for image galleries where we traditionally pick up a large amount of page impressions.

- Ajax java coding could significantly reduce the waiting time users experience when viewing galleries and display adverts to a user for a longer period of time. It could also be applied in other areas to improve the user experience and increase AET whilst improving the user experience.

Coupled with the idea of AET we should look at what the future holds for online publishing.

- This is their main platform on which to sell themselves to the users who visit our websites.

- Imagine a line up of website homepages on a newsstand. Which one would be the most popular? I would say the one that looks the best and shows off to a potential user as wide a range of content as is possible. How well would a magazine sell if 1/2 of the cover was taken up by an advert for a Vauxhall Corsa?

- In the same way in which The London Paper do a “cover takeover” websites could offer a homepage TO at a massive premium and at other times look to increase the amount of people getting to content with which they can actively engage and creating a more meaningful expedience for users and advertisers.

Ads should be tracked using time spent actively engaging them, not amount of times viewed. The time somebody views something and takes an entire message means more than seeing the start of a message twice as many times.

What is Active Engagement Time? (AET) – You heard it here first!

- AET is how long a user spends viewing, reading, listening to and watching content. It does not count the time spent moving between content and waiting for it to load.

- AET is something I think will become increasingly important to web publishing companies and will increase if the function of a website is to provide to the user.

- The longer we can make a users AET with a product and the more users we can get the better our products will become.

- AET is a two way process between the user and the content provider.

ABCe reports currently state the amount of unique users and page impressions. I predict this will change to unique users and AET or an equivalent.

We should do one thing to become dominant in online publishing. Actively engage users.

The web is a constantly evolving environment in which to be truly successful we have to think two steps ahead.

Fundamentally I think we should develop an online publishing environment that puts the user first.

Form should follow function. This is particularly relevant on the web. At the moment many sites form is decided by the function required by advertisers to drive page impressions, I would say this is true of many websites.

Advertisers do not make the site successful, users do. Without users you don’t get advertisers. We can grow audiences millions if we put users first. This will ultimately bring in more advertisers.

- The form of our websites should be a direct result of the need to provide content to users. Not provide users to adverts.

- We should put users before advertisers in order to grow our audience and increase the amount of time they spend engaging with our products.

What is a better measure of success?

A. A site that has 25 page loads per user and engages users for 10 minutes
B. A site that has 5 page loads per user and engages users for 20 minutes

Time wins for me, every time!

1. Page impressions will mean little in the future.
2. We seem very focused them.
3. This is great short term, but not for the long term.

- Unless you can sell 100% of them then they serve no positive purpose. They just add extra stress to servers and frustrate people who ultimately want to engage with content as efficiently as possible.

- Page loads only serve to put people off browsing sites further and spending more time on them.

- The faster a site can get people to content the more time they will be to spend on the website.

4. Unique users mean everything.
5. They should be our number one priority.
6. Building dedicated, actively engaged audiences is the future.

Time is the single most important thing we all possess, it’s precious, finite and because of this users are rightly increasingly careful about how they choose to spend it online. If we can make users spend more time with our products the products will become more valuable venues for advertisers to talk to consumers.