Service Before Content: Creating experiences online that people will pay for. from YABOYA on Vimeo.

I gave this presentation at Bizcamp Dublin on the 29th May, 2010.

In it, I suggest that in order to sell something online, media companies and other content producers must re-assess what exactly are the problems they are solving and who are their customers.

Advertising is a pretty simple business model to comprehend, and I explain it in this video.  However, the competition for advertisers and the eyeballs of an audience has increased dramatically thanks to the ease in which content can be distributed on the Internet.  So it is wise to concentrate on other business models which may be more complex and require a better understanding of customers, products and sales.

The good news for media companies is that they have plenty of advantages – brand recognition, existing access to audience, knowledge resources.  And startups also have some advantages over the big media players, the most significant of which is the freedom to identify from the very start who their customer is and build a business slowly from this foundation.