New Products, Old Content, Huge Profit

If you are sitting on top of a mountain of content, grab a shovel and follow this company’s lead.

Last week’s article on multiplatform publishing featured Premier Clinic, Premier Guitar’s multiplatform online education tool. Premier Clinic uses audio, text tiles, PDFs, video and musical charts to teach guitarists the finer points of their art for free.

Speaking with the company that powers Premier Clinic, TrueFire, has revealed an even greater example of multiplatform publishing that any publisher with a large archive can learn from.

Perennial Content

TrueFire CEO and founder Brad Wendkos says that TrueFire is the planet’s largest online selection of guitar lessons and courses. There are thousands of lessons available through TrueFire and it has been creating and archiving them in several formats for over a decade.

Most of those lessons are recycled through the platforms and formats that TrueFire delivers—what Wendkos calls “repurposing”—and what we call multiplatform publishing. TrueFire can do this is because its archive’s content is “perennial in nature,” Wendkos said.

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“We tend to focus not on the faddish stuff or trendy stuff. The blues is as popular today as it was 10 years ago and as it will be 10 years from now, ditto for jazz, ditto for rock,” Wendkos said.

Having a vast archive of content that does not lose relevance enables TrueFire to create new products with the same content over and over again—and it is the type of content you should be archiving. It could save you thousands in production costs and earn you thousands of new customers.

Easy to Deliver

Premier Clinic is a perfect example. Wendkos calls it a “satellite station” that offers monthly lessons in blues, rock, jazz and finger-style guitar through video, text files, audio and other platforms. All of the lessons (except for finger-style) come directly from TrueFire’s archives, which makes producing Premier Clinic “a cakewalk,” Wendkos said.

“The hardest part was making the infrastructure to make it a cakewalk. The stuff that took a lot of time, a lot of people, a lot of energy, and a lot of money was creating the digital library and the content serving architecture. Once that is in place, where ever we want a station, it’s just a matter of wiring it up.”

The best part is that people are watching Premier Clinic. It has generated almost 10,000 page views every week since its launch last month, said Peter Sprague, managing member of Gearhead Communications, the publishers of Premier Guitar.

Using Multiple Platforms

Premier Clinic is hardly the only streaming video website based on TrueFire’s archive. TrueFire controls at least 11 other musician-centric online TV stations. There are people from over 170 countries tuning in to stations like TrueFire.tv, Guitarplayertv.com and Jazzimprov.tv, Wendkos said.

In addition to it’s online television network, TrueFire uses it’s archive to sell

  • Access to over 3,500 interactive video lessons on its website
  • Instructional courses on CD ROMs that are mailed to customers
  • Online courses that extend for weeks
  • A downloadable tool available soon that will be directly linked to the archive and will allow users to download the same lessons they currently have to get from a mailed CD ROM. This will save TrueFire tons of money on production and shipping costs and will further satisfy customers, Wendkos said.

It has never been cheaper to make products in so many different formats and your online publishing business needs to take advantage of it. Users can now demand to receive the information they want, in the format they want, when they want, and if you don’t deliver it, a competitor will.

Start multiplatforming today by considering which kinds of content will provide your customers value for years. Then start archiving and using it to continually create new products in a variety of formats.

You should also read our America’s Test Kitchen case study for a fuller understanding of a multiplatform publishing business in today’s digital world.

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