Analytics is believed to be one of the differentiators for agile businesses to increase efficiency, achieve a better competitive advantage, and improve the bottom line. By using comprehensive analytics, organizations analyze more complex data and get more accurate results. Analytics is a powerful tool that is being leveraged for user behavior, users’ digital footprint, and content visibility leading to designing content solutions. The usage of analytics as a differentiator for content performance and market agility of content has opened several new opportunities for businesses. It not only assists in managing discoverability but also benefits the monetization of content.
Everyone is embracing analytics to identify opportunities, operating efficiencies, and cost optimizations within an organization. As a matter of fact, analytics has the potential to provide actionable insights to make informed decisions that drive business outcomes and yield measurable ROI. Content industry is no different, and as a result, usage data offers actionable insights for publishers and librarians.
The constant changes as well as growth in technology have completely changed the publishing sector. From the delivery of basic news and information to e-papers, infographics, and statistic reports, the industry has come very far in the past decade. Publishers are now connoisseurs of information analytics, education technology, and data-enabled content solutions. Thanks to this analytical help, there is now a whole lot of information, data, and reports owned by publishers. Through analytics and the focus on managing crucial components of content, publishers are focused on making content management simpler and yet more effective.
But there is a constant challenge in managing the taxonomy and metadata tagging to aid content discoverability. Improving the discoverability of content is done though smart innovation techniques. The complexity of data management needs to be handled by appropriate techniques from the initial stages of the content cycle. Without the use of proper techniques, basic descriptors for a book, article, journal remain inconsistent and incomplete. We need to target the consistency and enrich the metadata, which is the backbone of any content. Challenges related to managing metadata need to be dealt with for better discoverability and sales.
Repurposing content for different media is a solution to manage discoverability as well as increase its life space. Content on just one platform has a shorter lifespan and goes into archival in no time. Thus, repurposing content for different media helps to use the same information and present it in multiple ways for multiple platforms—print, digital, apps, social media, catalogues, databases, and so on. It assists in reusability and value creation for the content.
Today, content monetization is getting more popular and is becoming a focus area for publishers, who are moving away from traditional digital-content monetization approaches and experimenting with different models of content monetization. New technologies and innovations in digital media have opened up new avenues for building various monetization models. We understand that content must be adaptive for future use, and this has to be achieved in a cost-effective manner with its value intact.
In the past two decades, publishers have utilized the web to monetize content in terms of reaching out to end users and digitizing the content with advertising. The tools and technology components, such as digital asset management, user management, and usage analytics, have improved the decision-making and overall effectiveness of monetization processes.
Our team at Thomson Digital understands these needs and is committed to resolving discoverability as well as accessibility issues for different organizations through the help of AI/ML techniques. Such techniques include thorough research collaboration, production-workflow tools, discoverability, and data-driven quality.
We are working on metadata enrichment through UniTouch, our recently launched content-solution platform, and on content repurposing through our production and delivery tools. These lead to better discoverability of publishers’ content. We are introducing innovative and adaptive new technologies for resolving publishing-industry issues. Having acquired expertise in new age technologies to assist and manage the content through our services and product lines, we will make this content discoverable, which will then lead to improved monetization.
Metadata management is one of the primary tasks for managing a plethora of information that has been translated in multiple formats on multiple channels. We create better visibility, searchability, and discoverability of this content across the digital landscape so that the same content is used multiple times to generate more revenues.
The speed of managing content simultaneously on multiple platforms is essential for making content ready for all types of users on myriad digital platforms. With the efficiency of our workflow and delivery mechanism, we are able to drive the speed to achieve faster reach of the content.
As the industry moves toward modular content and smaller packets of information (rather than one big collective piece), Thomson Digital has taken this trend into consideration while designing our delivery models, where content is de-chunked from one big size to smaller bites. This has helped in our service desirability in the market. In this regard, our e-learning vertical works in repurposing content by customizing it into specific formats for specialized and targeted users.
Along with AL/ML techniques, Big Data is going to play a crucial role in managing the solutions and workflow. Big Data is particularly important when looking at data volume, variety, and rate. In the near future, Thomson Digital will be able to offer an intelligent usage-analytics tool to publishers that will provide data drill-down capabilities to further increase content reach to users, hence better monetization.
Thomson Digital, with its innovative technology wing DigiScape, is all set to provide technology-based solutions to capture the data at every stage through its content-solution platforms, including automation of metadata management and helping customers to build strategies for content monetization. We offer rich market experience as a solution partner as well as an innovation collaborator. As a part of this industry, we are committed to working with our customers to provide support in terms of innovation as well as technology expertise to build solutions that handle the business case of discoverability and content monetization. There is a big world of opportunities waiting to do better in terms of content management. And new age technologies are going to create the basis for designing innovative and new solutions for the same
Vinay Kumar Singh is the executive director and CEO of Thomson Digital.
