Business Model Canvas/Timelined Archives

Getting the job done?

Working with young audiences like I do in my daytime job as a editor for six magazines for kids and teens, positioning with the demographic elements is very hard. The older the young audience is, the harder is segmenting with the age group. Teenagers are by far the hardest group to define with basic demographics, since the age seems to be only thing in common with teens. As consumers they are different than older consumers, because they basically have no income, for example.

I liked the article by Christensen et al. (Harvard Business Review,  December 2005) mainly because of the following reasons. I especially liked the segmenting with the “getting the job done” -thinking. As said in the article !The problem is that customers don’t conform their desires to match those of the average consumer in their demographic article.”

As a segmentation model, the getting the job done -thinking starts with understanding the reason, the job, what for is the product created. With the nice milkshake example, burger joint found out two specific situations when people are buying milkshakes: to get some activity while driving car to work in a traffic jam or buying extra time for kids while parents are still finishing their meals on a burger restaurant. After these findings, there were made some adjustments to products: for the working people milk shakes needed to be more chunkier to get the long-lasting effect and for kids the milk shake needed to be in a more liquid form to get the kids drink the milk shake faster.

What is there to learn in getting the job done -thinking? At my point of view as a editor and ideator, I need to focus more on the problem side when creating new ideas, new business plans and new ideas for the old products. What is really the job there needs to be done with my product? Is there any job for my products? If the answer to the last question is no, then I am going to have some big problems to solve.

When talked about market surveys, I really like going into micro level of things. I like the idea to go into customers decisions, with qualitative methods and trying to find out something valuable in the decisions. I think when adopting the getting the job done -thinking, there needs to be a lot of micro level thinking involved.

Timelined Archives, continued

Hi all! I made this “cool” picture:

Timelined Archives & the business side

I kinda like the idea of Timelined Archives (working title!) so I made answers to my homework assignments based on that idea, not Playable Magazine. I still haven’t forgotten the idea about Playable Magazine, I just think it needs just a little more thinking on a concept side.

Is there growth potential in the field you are in?

If looked the print media business overall, the trend is somewhat going down, as we all know. Printed media volumes going down and very rare player in the traditional media business is making good money of the internet content.

I still think, there is more in archives, that yet discovered. When you are into certain topic, you want to read everythink about it. In the best scenario, you want to read the content from your favourite content provider, tadaa, magazine publisher.

Is there $$ involved?

Yes. Actually there are a lot of possible revenue stream options in the Timelined Archives:

• Selling the “package” in a neat, digital format (all content about artist searched, videos, articles, web stories, pictures.)
• Selling the “package” in a neat printed format! (if the costs of digital printing are reasonable.)
• Selling the single articles, picture galleries, video galleries, etc..
• Selling merchandise based on artist (basic merchandise with co-operation with record labels.)
• “Print your own posters” -service attached. Select a picture and you get a poster.
• And of course: Timelined Archives is definetily an essential part of the printed magazine.

Are your future competitors making money?

Well, as far as I know, selling archived content is small, but on the same time cost-efficient business. But Timelined Archives is very scalable, so if the platform is build correctly and user-friendly, I think it might grow into big business. And yet there is one thing to remember, it is content produced already, so it is basically free to use again (of course the rights for reproducing content needs to be clear.)

There is at least one service available based on a similar kind of “collecting archives” or generating your own news services. One example is www.lmk.com, which is a “create your own app based on a topics you want to know.”

What is the consumer need for the service and how big is your potential market?

This one is simple:

When you are passionate for something, you want to read everything available on that topic.

And the markets? Hmmm.. Think about different hobbies, tv-series and bands available. I think the market is pretty big.

Timelined archives

I browsed through my original ideas for MediaBizLab and I came up with an interesting idea, which I want to test with you guys (according to statistics, I have something between 2 to 58 readers daily).

The idea of  “One topic magazine” took a few steps forward, when I started to think about being a fan of an certain artist. Let’s take example of a girl aged 13, who is a huge fan of Anna Abreu, the Finnish artist.

When you are a fan of someone, you want to read everything available of the topic. Old magazines are often thrown away and finding the information doing a basic web search generates relevant topics, but also a lot of non relevant topics.

What if there was a application or a web service, which does the searching on a certain topic from the magazines archives and combines them into archives found on a magazines website? And then the results would be combined into a neat, graphical “timeline” (I guess, the name needs to something else than the timeline, because of the recent Facebook vs. Timelines -case…)

I try to visualize my thoughts into picture:

By searching Anna Abreu, the program finds out all the articles, pictures, web content and other relevant information published. You can buy the content separately or as a neat package in the nice format like Flipboard. How cool is that!

Going further with the business side, there could also be a possibility to order old print magazines, order photos or posters and more.

And of course it is fully scalable! Think about all the artists available, all the cars available, all the hobbies available and so on!

What do you think? Do you like or hate the idea?

About the concept of Playable Magazine

Ok, it is a bit hard to pitch idea, when you have no concrete samples of what you want to do. I still pitched the idea for a few people in a general level and got some good points.1. What is the main idea of Playable Magazine?
At this point, it might be hard trying to create a general model of playable magazine, a model which applies to every single magazine on earth. Actually, I think, that the playable or gamification elements will break through almost every service available, but still the job is easier to handle if you focus on some particular group.

For me, the group is easily picked from readers of Suosikki-magazine. Suosikki is a magazine focused to girls aged roughly 13-17 and topics in the magazine include music, movies, tv, lifestyle, fashion, relationships and so on.

If thought about the younger girls in a scale 13-17, the games played include simple, casual games like MiniClip, Facebook-games (FarmVille, etc.), quizzes and mobile games such as Angry Birds mentioned before.

So by combining great content made co-operation with game users and some games added relevant to topics/article, that might be a good start?

The key elements for success are:

1. “modifying” or customizing your magazine (changing fonts, colours, maybe even primary reading topics, avatars)

2. Gaining points/badges reading articles, by playing games, by commenting other peoples contribution

3. Getting socialized with other readers/players

4. Getting yourself in to the magazine (fit yourself in the hottest clothest of the season, share it and dig it)

5. Winning the game? (Who is the winner and what does the winner get?)

2. Platform?

First I thought that playable magazine is definetily a tablet one. Then I took another look into the target group and what do I see? No tablets, but a lot of smartphones and a lot of laptops. So, forget about the tablet for a while. I think the Playable Magazine for teenagers should be build on a web service and cool application.

3. “Magazines still have their strength in making top editorial content.” – or not?

I used the sentence above in the SlideShare document I made earlier. One friend of mine criticized on that particular sentence by saying that according to statistics, public tends to like more top interactive possibilities and community -thinking than top editorial content.

And he just might be right. I think that for playable magazine co-creating and crowsourcing has a key element and the journalists are just the ones who make something out of co-created creative mess?

Playable Magazine/Day In The Life

Day In The Life Of Playable Magazine

 

Maija is a 14-years old girl who spends a lot of time in internet and social media. She communicates with her friend on Facebook, as well as in school yard. She is bored of traditional media, although she like browsing her mother’s magazines every once in a while.

 

But what she really loves is the new Playable Magazine. This particular morning, after checking her Facebook wall for possible new messages, she opens her iPad and logs in to her magazine. She can see her avatar, which is picture of her with some additional features (which she has bought by contributing). Se has went down on the rank in the game and she knows the reason. Maija just haven’t had enough time for reading and participating in content producing.

 

Where she has been active, though, is the part of the magazine working on a article on Johnny Depp. She has browsed some sites the editors of the magazine suggested and highlighted the interesting parts with a funny game. Whoever is the fastest one gathering the information wanted, gets the most poits.

 

There are some other Playable Magazines available, but this one particularly is made for Maija. Actually, it is partly made by Maija and whoever wins the cover game, the hardest game available, gets to choose next cover. Maija hasn’t been chosen for the cover maker yet, but this month could make a difference.  And Johnny Depp it is, hopefully, Maija thinks and shares the last post to her Facebook wall from Playable magazine.

 

Business model canvas/Playable magazine

Just practising using Business Model Canvas. I will get back to this topic by the end of this week, but here’s one picture showing out, what could Playable Magazine look like from the business side. In this canvas, focus is strictly on platform made for publishers or in platform co-created together with game developer.

Playable magazine it is!

So, the MediaBizLab finally started yesterday at Sanomatalo, Helsinki and what a day it was. There were us 13 students all excited about the studies. I think the group is great and there is definetily potential in everyone’s media service idea.

By the end of day we pitched our media service ideas to professional “jury”, which consisted our mentors/coaches for this study year as well as some of the last years MBL-students. I presented the idea about Playable magazine and I got absolutely great feedback.

I made a quick SlideShare document about my further ideas concerning Playable Magazine. There’s still a lot to solve, but I think following ideas are a good start. What do you think?

Playable magazine

View more presentations from Ville Kormilainen

Manual of me

This is part of the assignments from first MediaBizLab meeting. The manual of me is based on a FourSight analysis.

Personality: Driver

1) I am not clarifier.
This means
- I usually don’t spend a lot time on clarifying the issues before exploring answers.

2) I am definitely ideator
This means:
- I like to create concepts and ideas, especially big ones
- I am not much of detail person, I like the bigger picture

3) I am not a developer
This means:
- I have to practice analysing more

4) I am implementer
This means:
- I want to put hands on action and do it fast

So, for starters, few easy tips for working with me:

• You might want to help me with analysing and thinking about ideas
• I love creating big ideas
• I might be a fast implementor, so you might need to cool me down sometimes a bit
• I am practising to be a better listener, so you can help me with that
• I don’t take things too much personally, so feel free to critisize, comment and challenge my ideas.