Morgan Stanley bullish on "next generation content"

A new report from Morgan Stanley is bullish on RSS and its commercial potential. (Thanks to John Palfrey for the pointer.)

Among the points they make:
- "While Google’s search engine and advertising tools set the pace for new ways of searching information, we believe that Yahoo! may be setting the pace for new ways of serving information…" They are referring here to Yahoo's use of RSS in conjunction with My Yahoo. The use of RSS feeds in a custom aggregator built into My Yahoo! is nothing revolutionary to early-adopters. But by putting RSS and aggregator usage into a tool that millions of non-techie users are already comfortable with, Yahoo! is bringing RSS and aggregator usage quickly into the mainstream. (I was happy to find that this blog can be found through the My Yahoo! RSS search and is easily added to your My Yahoo! page. Interestingly, the current version of my North Korea zone blog did not come up in the search, only the old abandoned Typepad site.)

- “Next generation content” should gain noticeable usage and revenue traction in 2005…"
Do we have another bubble coming? Or is this the real, more substantive internet revolution?
The report authors believe "improvements in the following areas will be important to watch: 1) search; 2) personalization; 3) user-generated content (including blogs, reviews, images and audio); 4) music; 5) short- and long-form video; and 6) accessibility (including mobile devices and the PC desktop). Net, we are moving nicely down a path toward every Internet user, in effect, having a personal media server…"

Yes. Is this the democratization of media? Or will commercialization eventually drown out the free voices that have been putting the fear of God (or at least the Fear of Truth) into politicians and network anchors? We must work to make sure that as business models evolve in this new medium, the public debate is enhanced, diversified and made more free, not less.

The authors see an online media future in which a "tail" of free-expressing individuals and groups feeds into what becomes a more established, popular middle "mainstream" - which is where the money is to be made in advertising, subscriptions and the like. The freewheeling unorthodox and micro-audience "tail" and its freedom to express itself (for whatever incentive: financial, social, activist, exhibitionist or whatever) feeds the "mainstream" and keeps it fresh and vital. I like this model, as it points to a media world in which maverick bloggers and mainstream media are not competing against one another in a zero-sum game, but rather depend upon each other for fresh material. This makes the encouragement of democratic freedom of expression good for business. Good news. Very good news.

Read the whole report for some very interesting thoughts about future business models. There is much discussion of the "eBay" model for news and information. It deserves to be read in the original, so I won't summarize it here.

The report concludes:

We would like to think that the popularization of syndicated content could further fulfill some promise of an engaging, useful and vibrant user-generated medium on the Internet. This does not suggest the end of mass media, either broadcast or narrowcast, but it could represent significant changes in consumption and monetization. If the Internet is a marketplace of ideas, then the best ideas should float to the top, with traditional mass media perhaps serving as a tool for legitimizing/establishing discourse. The driver for Yahoo!, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Amazon.com’s Internet successes has been their never-ending quest to create the perfect, seamless user experience—in other words, they do right by their users. What open syndication shows is that by doing right by their users and independent publishers, they also have the potential ability to do right by investors, in our view.

But don't rely on my summary and excerpts. Read the whole thing.