Lizzer Blog

While Lizzer is pretty handy for anyone who sends emails, tweets, blogs, or does just about anything on the web - that’s not all.

Lizzer is also a tool that any company can use to turn content - images, videos, articles, etc. - into revenue.  Newspapers, magazines, sports franchises, colleges and universities - so many companies and organizations have content that they would love to earn money from. It’s just not obvious how to do it.

When it comes to content today, it’s a lot like the music business BEFORE the arrival of iTunes

It wasn’t that long ago that music companies were fighting a battle against free downloads. And they weren’t doing too well.

If a college student wanted a song, it was just a matter of downloading a free version from any number of services. In other words, it was actually EASIER to just take the content than to go to a store and buy it in the form you wanted. Recall that the services that the labels had created were burdened with rights management regimes, weird formats, and very limited libraries. Anyone want to sign up for a service that gives you Sony artists but none from Warner Brothers?

Um - no thanks.

When the experience of borrowing, stealing, taking - insert your favorite term here - is easiest, that’s what people will do.

Of course all of that changed with iTunes.  iTunes makes it easy to find, try, and buy music (and lots of other stuff now as well) than to simply take/borrow/steal it.

For so many content companies, it’s like April 27, 2003 - the day before the opening of what was called the iTunes Music Store.

from youtube

If you’re the Atlanta Journal & Constitution or Major League Baseball or even The Simpsons, you’re just in the uncomfortable position of having to either give away content for free or charge people for access. And charging for access is a lot like getting people to pay a cover charge to go to a concert featuring a musician they don’t know. Not many folks will do it.

For now, from a consumer’s point of view,  it’s just easier to use Google or any number of sources to search and find any element of content - from the video of the mayor’s speech to an image of Homer Simpson eating a donut - and then just use it. Using it can mean anything from putting it into a blog post, inserting it into an email, or even pasting it into a presentation.

The presenting challenge: the conversation about your brand outside your site is BIGGER than inside

Let’s say that you’re a content owner, like the NBA - The National Basketball Association. It’s really the mission of the NBA to monetize all of the content related to all of its teams.  While the  TV contract is the big enchilada, the NBA could also decide that it would like to actually make money from either standard or new types of content.

We’re just using the NBA as an example. All rights of the NBA and that stuff belongs to the NBA! Please watch your favorite basketball team on TV and visit NBA.com.

Okay, back to our example.  Like so many other content owners, NBA.com has to get people to visit its site to make much money.  The traditional tools here are regular display ads and affiliate ads. Oh, and let’s not forget the pre-roll and post-roll ads on video - pitching the same advertiser.  In this instance, it’s T-Mobile. NBA.com will earn an affiliate fee for every person who clicks through the ad and signs up for T-Mobile. While regular display ads pay a few pennies, an affiliate ad could pay several dollars.

While this represents the state of the art in display advertising - and can make some headway toward monetizing the millions of visitors, we’re still applying a TV advertising model to the web.

As you’ll see in this chart from Quantcast , NBA.com receives upwards of 7 million visitors a month to its site. Let’s look at a few comparisons.

If I search on just ONE star player, I can see that more than 15 million searches are performed for variations of the term Lebron (James). When I do a simple Google search on Lebron, there are more than 13.2 million search results - and happily for NBA.com, the top result is Lebron’s profile page.

What’s the point?

The conversation about Lebron outside of NBA.com is BIGGER than the conversation inside NBA.com. Same goes for the subject of any story in the New York Times or about a popular subject like Star Trek or a new movie or just about anything. The web is a really large place and you’re suffering from hubris if you think that for any topic that you’re going to get the lion’s share of the attention. The attention of users is spread across the web - they’re all over the place, on blogs, twitter, social networks, forums - you name it.

So, where does Lizzer come in?

Lizzer will let you take your existing content and put it into the hands of people who are having the conversation about your brand. These people might be bloggers, forum participants, or maybe just regular users of your content who want to email their friends with the latest. Suffice it to say that Lizzer makes it easy to set your content free so it can take flight beyond the confines of your web domain.

So, how does this make you any money?

Well, with Lizzer, you can easily charge for access to content or can ensure that wherever your content goes, your advertising can go as well.  The goal here is to put your content in the hands of  those who are going to have the conversation about your brand(s). Oh, and not to mention, this will do wonders for word of mouth and referrals back to your own site.  Every time your content appears on another site, it’s an outpost that can drive referral traffic.

Lizzer can help you do 5 different things that can improve your overall revenue generation from existing content assets of any type.

1. Let your users subscribe to and use your content for a fee  (e.g., Get access to unique clips and content not available otherwise)
2. Provide access to existing content that is wrapped with an advertisment (e.g., Access to videos or images, embedded with display ad)
3. Enrich specific locations (forums, blogs, sites) with unique content access (e.g. Enable special content for partners)
4. Provide access to ALL existing brand assets  (e.g., Provide access to logos, images, extensive inventory of historical content)
5. Place specific, interesting content in front of all Lizzer users (e.g., Put the hottest clips or images in the Lizzer bookmarklet dropdown)

1. Let your users subscribe to and use your content for a fee  (e.g., Get access to unique clips and content not available otherwise)

If you have interesting content and would like to charge users for access, it’s relatively simple to do.  In this example, a site like NBA.com would create a place where users would be able to create an account, sign up, arrange for payment, and then be directed through  an integrated Lizzer and content provider site. Alternatively, you could just get the account set up (including arranging for payment), and then direct the user to Lizzer with the correct login and password.

Of course, this assumes that you’ve gone through the effort required to identify what content you are going to provide,  developing an API or adding this content to an existing API, and then working out a deal with Lizzer. Suffice it to say - just about any content company has a way of creating a content subscription service with some effort.

It’s important to note that such an effort would require some design work to ensure that the entire experience is on strategy, and that users are satisfied (and attracted to) the array of content being provided. Here’s a mocked up version of how a Lizzer bookmarklet would be customized to support a specific content provider, such as the NBA:

As you see in this example, Lizzer has been customized with several different types of content. The types of content that you might provide for buyers is only limited by your specific business and your imagination. In this example, we’re showing an example of how users might be interested to have an easy to find resource for player statistics that they might add to a simple email. You can imagine that fantasy sports fanatics would certainly find information like this very useful.

In the newspaper business, this type of functionality would be a great way for a newspaper to provide access to its library of articles, images, videos and just about anything else. Users who’ve decided that they don’t need or want the newspaper, may be intrigued by the wealth of local content that might be available.  Want to get the news of the local high school football playoff game? Need a picture of the opening of the new museum?

In any case, what’s key here is that for relatively modest sum, any content company can begin experimenting with selling content.

2. Provide access to existing content that is wrapped with an advertisment (e.g., Access to images or videos, embedded with display ad)

Selling access to content might be something that you’re just not ready to do. If you’re used to the ad model, then you might want to keep your content free and just pass along the bill to your advertisers. But how?

As you’ve probably figured out by now, Lizzer makes it easy to insert links, images, videos, and just about anything (MP3s, games, and so on) into a blog, forum, email, or website. I’m using Lizzer to insert the links, images, videos and stuff into this page right now.

One thing you might not realize is that Lizzer can also “wrap” just about any element, say an image, with HTML. This means that you can provide your users access to your content through Lizzer, but that when they insert an image or a video, they will also insert an display or text ad.

As you’ll see in this example, again using NBA.com, when one of your users embeds a video, he/she will also embed an advertisement.

3. Enrich specific locations (forums, blogs, sites) with unique content access (e.g. NBA.com can enable special content for partners)

Of course the NBA is more than just the NBA, it includes all of the teams, big partners like the beer companies and many other big advertisers. In the same way, there may be many reasons why it could be interesting to create exclusive access to content on a different site.

Lizzer can be customized with the branded content (images, videos, music, etc) and then embedded into the text editor for exclusive use on a site. In this way, you can help site visitors create especially rich and interesting content.

Let’s assume that NBA.com wanted to start a rich social network that would offer a great place for fans to talk about games, including during games, using things like a Twitter stream.

In this instance, by creating an NBA.com specific version of Lizzer, the association could make sure that fans would have access to its rich content while in its social network. Instead of making fans write about statistics or specific once in a lifetime plays, they could simply search, find, and insert them right then in blog posts or forum posts.

Here’s a mockup of how that might work - in this instance, we’re showing a customized version of Lizzer at work in an NBA focused bulletin board:

As you can see, this rich content would make the entire social network more interesting, invite more spidering from Google, and create a highly virtuous cycle of more users and even more content.

The same model works for just about any branded content property. Even the local newspaper franchise might find more interest in their discussion boards and social efforts (even on Facebook groups), if they were to let users gain access to richer content.

Everyone wants to be able to tell a great story.

4. Provide access to ALL existing brand assets  (e.g., Enable access to logos, images, extensive inventory of historical content)

Inside many content-based companies, there are small, sometimes profitable operations providing access to the archives.  When a company is focused on today and tomorrow, it can be very easy for overlook the value of an archive of content.

With Lizzer, a content company can finally open up access to an unlimited amount of archived data. This historical information might be the classic long tail information - maybe an old article or an obituary from a newspaper. Or, it might just be a video from a basketball game last year.

In any case, with the right API in place and assuming the business model has been put in place, Lizzer can bring new content to the forefront.

In addition to providing access to the old stuff, Lizzer can also help you provide access to stuff that you might not even realize would be of value to bloggers and emailers, among others.

In this mocked up example, we’re showing that even images of game tickets could be used to promote and remember a big game or a great outing with friends:

5. Place specific, interesting content in front of all Lizzer users (e.g., Put the hottest clips or images in the Lizzer bookmarklet dropdown)

While I’ve spent a lot of space talking about the more customizable abilities of Lizzer, there’s just one more. As you’ll see on every Lizzer bookmarklet, there’s a dropdown bar that we use as a web equivalent of product placement. In other words, if you’re a Lizzer partner, you can also choose to place your most interesting or hottest content into rotation so that random Lizzer users will come across what’s new.

Because Lizzer users are really publishers, people who blog, twitter, send emails and lots of other stuff, they can be a very attractive audience for getting the word out. Also, remember, because Lizzer users are de facto publishing, getting them to use your content is a high leverage activity as they’re certain to be inserting it somewhere where other people will see it.

As an example, here’s a mockup of how Lizzer could help drive word of mouth for a movie:

How to get started

If you’re interested in learning more about how Lizzer might be able to help you, please give us a call.   We would be happy to talk to you about your specific challenges and see how Lizzer might be part of a solution. We’ve a large team of developers, designers, and marketers who can help you understand what’s possible when it comes to getting the most out of your content.

Oh and just in case you haven’t already, please go ahead and sign up and use Lizzer. It will give you a good idea of how the bookmarklet works and also help you understand how Lizzer might be a platform that you can use. Let me know how it goes.