The funky rhythm of content syndication
Content distribution talk, after a while, can become a rather dull subject. Not with the
De Fontenay Brothers
29 May 2001, 10 am GMT
Cybernavigation is admittedly a very exciting and addictive activity
Virtually 'go everywhere and meet everyone', til you drop.
Content-wire online search for ultimate content truths is never ending, and despite the sometimes tedious job of detangling technologies and business models – how boring – we come across exceptional individuals who drive progress on the net single handed, and in different directions
This week we chat to Eric & Sounni de Fontenay, aka ‘ de Fontenay brothers'.
Their company, Tag It, specializes in creating and distributing music news.
They provide an online service for distributing press releases and publications include Mi2n, MusicDish, and 'LA' Ritmo.
We find out a bit more about their background and activities
What you do looks very exciting, can you explain better your positioning in the content industry?
In broad terms, we act as an infomediary/CSP (content service provider) for the new media and entertainment sector. On the one hand, we work with content creators focused on the B2B market to provide a publishing and syndication platform. We have agreements with over thirty industry professionals with experiences ranging from the Dept. of Justice, European Commission, new media consultants, published authors and executives. On the other hand, we act as a leading media player in the field through our online properties MusicDish (http://www.musicdish.com) & Mi2N (http://www.mi2n.com), as well as creating revenue through retail and syndication channels.
More recently, we have focused on converging the synergies between our publishing, syndication and consulting business, thus far largely kept separate. This convergence is what we are calling e-publishing and allows us to leverage our credibility as a media player, relationships and services under syndication and analytical resources through consulting. We are presently working with Diebold, a leading German IT consultancy, to apply the concept to their reports, starting with "Wanted: A Survival Plan for the Music Industry". As a result of that work, we are in the process of securing two future reports and will be making some announcements in the coming weeks of similar agreements in consulting and book publishing fields.
You seem to operate in an English speaking environment, how important is multilingual content for you?
What has been interesting has been the extent to which the multi-lingual issue as so suddenly come to the fore for our company. In addition to Diebold (German), we are working with several French research and consulting concerns and other EU parties, largely as a result of a growing effort we launched last fall. On the one hand, language has not been a significant issue at this early stage. English serves as a common language for communication or collaborative work, and since they come to us in part to reach the US market, the content is also in English.
The fact that we are European citizens I believe has certainly helped us in establishing ties in Europe relatively quickly, but ironically, that has been in part also due to our presence in the US and lesser extent UK, Canada and Oceana. In addition, we believe, and this has been substantiated by our early experience with Diebold, providing high quality, more euro than us-centric content allows us to distinguish us from our competitors. Thus, while we are increasingly going global, that multi-lingual environment has been to our advantage rather than detriment.
Syndicating content to a global audience, on the other hand, presents numerous challenges.
It should be noted that a good proportion of European sites have a significant amount of English content and are looking to expand this aggressively (such as our News Channel partner Digimusic.net).
While this will always be true, especially for B2B content where the sites has every incentives to leverage the same content among largely English-speaking EU and US professionals. So the effect may will not be nearly as bad for our target market. But we believe that the English-language dominance will progressively lessen as the proportion of non-US users get connected. Our approach will be primarily by partnering with national/regional players. This will allow us to avoid the tremendous upfront and operating cost associated with each individual market, a proposition that at this stage is not profitable going solo.
http://www.taggin.com
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