Content Providers
The web continues to expand in scope, interconnectedness, diversity, and
accessibility. The visitor darts among search, sites, social-media/activities, and
dedicated applications with increasing mobility and lability. No longer can the
site-owner present only "own" catalog/content and expect to engage the visitor for long. No longer
can the digital-content owner build a fence around content and rely on search,
advertising, links from aggregators, or visitor loyalty to deliver a reliable, revenue
stream. The fortress or walled-city-state model of a web of largely isolated sites and
content-sources is dying. Imagine if physical products were only offered for sale at the
factory and buyers were required to visit each factory to buy items produced there! The
visitor expects to engage content in context of relevant activity and intention-focus,
regardless of where he or she might be in cyberspace.
This revolution in visitor behavior presents a major challenge to the walled-web of
fortress city-states that bind content (largely own or proprietary) to location at
design time. Site-owners have neither the time nor the expertise to maintain full
awareness of potential content-sources or presentation opportunities (both internal and
external!) relevant to their objectives. Content owners have under-developed
sales/distribution capabilities, relying today either own- monetization of visitors or
bulk-content contracts with enterprise buyer/publishers. Few are prepared to respond to
this evolution from location-centric web to visitor-in-attention/activity-context one.
The DigitalScirocco Market
DigitalScirocco meets this challenge by operating the world's most advanced
per-impression digital-content exchange. We remove the friction between the
creation, publishing and consumption of content, matching digital content with
presentation opportunities to place the right content in front of the right visitor at
the right time and place, maximizing the realized value for both buyer and
seller. Providing full flow-control to both publisher and content-owner, DS uses
efficient market-based mechanisms to execute per-impression auctions between candidate
digital assets and presentation opportunities, in real-time and
per-impression. Combining discovery, targeting, rights/payment management, and delivery
in a single integrated platform, DS frees content from the confines of
fixed-at-design-time locations and allows it to flow to where s value can be fully
realized, whether within site or across the web. Similar to a stock exchange, Google
keyword auctions, or other efficient markets, DS tracks visitor-in-context to discover
and optimize the value of location and content.
The Longest Journey Begins with the First Step.
The above argument is both abstract and risk-laden. To continue our walled fortress-city
analogy, it would be reckless to simply tear down the walls. Rather, we could establish
gates that can be progressively widened as the opportunity is understood and the path
clarifies. DigitalScirocco provides both that gate and gate-keeper. Example immediate
steps for the site owner are suggested below.
Site Opportunities
The site-owner can begin by freeing own-content within site. Early, limited versions of
this were and are based on echoing visitor behavior across related products in a retail
product catalog. Products, however, are just one element of site content - articles,
analyses, promotions, reference material, and visitor commentary are all valuable
elements of your content inventory. The cross-source semantic content model in the
DigitalScirocco exchange enables targeted placement of any site content, whether part of
the site "product catalog" or not, in both primary and supplemental roles. Market-based
mechanisms then optimize that placement with respect to placement-specific
objectives. By contrast, the typical recommender, while it does allow limited types of
content to move within site, does so merely by echoing past visitor behavior - this is
not a strategy for driving visitor engagement or revenue.
Another step for the site-owner can be to incorporate external content into the
site, for example a commentary on a site article or story, a stock chart or related
information on a finance-related page, or perhaps a twitter-stream on the topic of
interest. Site owners need effective content, presentation, pricing, and performance
control to unify internal and external content sources into a single coherent
environment. DigitalScirocco's exchange provides site owners the editorial, creative,
merchandising, personalisation, and financial control they need to make effective use of
external content in enhancing site performance. Driven by effective analytics, with
included discovery, curation, targeting and distribution, we allow content to be
imported on a per-impression basis, automatically optimizing to ensure relevance to the
current visitor and page, and presenting the imported cotnent as an organic component of
the site, with no off-site links.
Finally, the site can send selected content off-site, whether through targeted
email, visitor social-networks, or the DigitalScirocco public market.
Summary
The web continues to expand in scope, interconnectedness, diversity, and
accessibility. The ongoing revolution in visitor behavior presents a major challenge to
the traditional web. s per-impression sales and distribution platform meets this
challenge by providing the world's most advanced per-impression digital-content
management. We remove the friction between the creation, publishing and consumption of
content, matching digital content with presentation opportunities to place the right
content in front of the right visitor at the right time and place, maximizing the
realized value of content for both owner and publisher.
