But how do you make content that can be amplified ad infinitum? What happens when media start writing stories for robots? And can BuzzFeed bridge the gap between social-centric content and long-form political analysis?

On Friday, I hosted a panel at the Monaco Media Forum on the topic of content virality. Here is the video of the discussion with BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, Unruly Media CEO Scott Button and AOL video SVP Ran Harnevo…

Bonus video: also at the forum, Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser interviewed me about the recent controversy surrounding the BBC over its reporting of sexual abuse…

But I think we may be back, baby. After only a few hours at the Monaco Media Forum this week, I was struck by the enthusiasm displayed around a clutch of companies — especially those like BuzzFeed, Vox Media, Buzz Media, Thrillist and Tumblr — that suggests, just as Bill Gates said 16 years ago, content is the next hot business model again.

Theirs is a quite different approach from legacy media and, for many, effective monetization is at yet unproven. But a confluence of prospects appears to light the way, for a content template, at least for a certain sub-set of new-wave players. The ennui setting in around networks like Facebook is giving way to excitement about creation platforms like Tumblr. For an industry that was supposedly on its knees, this seems refreshing.

Here’s what I’ve been learning about why:

1. Branded content may be the money-maker

Everyone is talking about “branded content”, “sponsored content” or “native advertising”. While advertiser-funded articles, video and so on are not necessarily new, many old-line publishers had, until recently, been cautious to blur lines too far.

What we are now seeing, however, is a wave of pure-play online publisher with far fewer hang-ups about unifying church and state — and an old guard that, spurred by ongoing decline and recently-relaxed European rules, is following suit.

Marketers themselves are also bullish. Excited about growing publisher willingness and desperate to get their messages across unobtrusively, advertisers are super-keen to pile money in to content creation of their own.

Good timing. “The banner is about to die and is already cratering,” BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti said during a panel discussion in Monaco, channelling the community’s shared concern about falling rates. “Now more brands are coming to us saying, ‘We want to be more like a publisher and you know how to do that.’”

For publishers that can both amplify advertisers and retain readers’ trust, this could emerge as a realistic new revenue model to help sustain the content creation sector going forward.

2. Social is content’s best friend

Nobody is operating in old vacuums anymore. Content publishers are fortunate now to benefit from a massive traffic hose, the social networks.

As some users tire of sharing their own baby photos and “likes” online, new-wave publishers think the object of their sharing is, increasingly, becoming “quality” content. As Thrillist’s Ben Lerer said: “The people who stand out are going to be the content creators who create the best content.”

Fahad Khan, CEO of social media conversation manager OnePublic, said during another session: “I don’t have friends who are experts in all fields. They can’t fulfill my interest verticals. I turn to editorial.”

Said Vox Media’s Joe Purzycki, publisher of SB Nation, The Verge and now Polygon: “From a content and marketing perspective, there’s nothing more valuable than social right now. Within three months of launching The Verge, our content was being shared more widely on Twitter and Facebook than our next three closest rivals.”

3. Matching supply with demand

More than just that, we are witnessing the emergence of a class of media company that relies on technology, not just its founding editorial mission, to determine what it publishes. By harnessing what search data says about what web users “want to read”, publishers can create articles to satisfy that need.

It is an efficient system to make a geek proud; journalism as platform, an audience for everything — no article goes to waste. Publishing begins to become a perfectly matched supply-and-demand game, and that minimizes losses.

Peretti: “You can reach millions of people that way, just from making something someone wants to share with someone. There’s an opportunity to build a big media company that’s technology-enabled and socially created for a world of sharing.”

Yet this is a very different kind of content creation from the journalists’ stories that readers don’t know they want but which reporters think must be read. A tail wagging a dog, perhaps. Serendipity, be damned.

Vox’s Purzycki said: “We’re not going to change what we’re writing based on social response all the time. But we use that data daily to drive ‘why was this popular’ and, from a brand standpoint, show them how widely it was shared”.

4. Devices are lighting up a new path

Two brief years in, tablets and mobile devices are giving optimism to content creators who see higher engagement, a straighter-line conversion from print and more attractive presentation

After 15 years in which the web was pretty much the only digital content channel in town, now we are delighting in a diverse number of screens and sizes and modalities, each designed for reading, watching and listening, not computing, and all of which beg, sumptuously, to be touched and consumed.

That’s only going to grow more commonplace. “Thirty-three percent of our traffic is coming from mobile,” Vox’s Joe Purzycki added. “We’re preparing for world where it’s 50 percent. These are perfect reading devices.”

5. Commerce and content can co-exist

Just as brands and publishers alike are beginning to think more expansively about advertiser-funded content, retailers are coming to regard content as one of the best possible drivers of ecommerce conversion.

Brands are being conceived, like fashion-and-beauty’s Asos and Birchbox, that marry articles and sales in the same place. Retailers are realising that, to move people to buy goods, storytelling is a great motivator, and honest, helpful guides are even better.

6. Paid content is really happening

iTunes’ 400 million credit cards on file, growing consumption of pay-for audio and video, and the continuing emergence of sexy new devices with payment mechanisms built in all point to a rosier outlook for business models that rely on charging consumers for content.

Even a start-up darling founder like Tumblr’s David Karp agrees, telling a Monaco Media Forum panel that the economics of content is the next hot investment area.”The ecosystem is at phase two right now – distribution,” Karp said. “The third phase has already started to show its face — the new economics. These people are building huge ecosystems — the next big step is going to be how they profit from it. We’re starting to see that in Kickstarter and in Etsy. I‘d be putting all my money in to that.”

7. Costs are falling

Content-making costs are falling rapidly. New technology platforms are allowing producers to make great stuff on the cheap and several publishers are leveraging pro-am production.

So much of professional content lately has been about cost cuts enacted by troubled big publishers. That hasn’t gone away. But now nimble web outfits are showing large players a plan for how content can be produced on the cheap, making possible content factories that can run at a fraction of their forebears.

This is often a rather different kind of low-grade output than that familiar to trusted professional print publishers — but quality doesn’t always have to fall with costs.

“We were producing broadcast-quality content from a small room in mid-town (Manhattan),” Vox’s Purzycki said.

Speaking to me at Monaco Media Forum, AOL Huffington Post Media Group international SVP Jimmy Maymann said:

“I can say for sure AOL is not shopping Huffington Post. But there has been a lot of interest.”

“It’s not on the cards. AOL is the owner. But I cannot stand here and say, some day, ‘AOL will not sell it if the price is high enough or there is a better owner’. But, right now, AOL is a good owner for Huffington Post and we’ll keep it.”

Maymann said investors had come forward.

Putting things right

Controversy and in-fighting dogged the post-acquisition integration, even as AOL effectively charged HuffPo with running and reinventing all AOL content itself.

“It came down to a few comments Arianna made around the integration,” Maymann told me. “No-one went out and said ‘that’s not the case’.

“One of of the things we potentially didn’t get right at Huffington Post was that it was totally integrated in to AOL, with the same tech team, HR and finance.

“Now we’ve taken a step back — Huffington Post, within AOL, is a standalone business. Only with that way can you unlock the full potential of it and have people feel that it is still Huffington Post DNA and culture.”

Going global

HuffPo has rolled out to post of its five non-U.S. markets by leaning on partnerships with legacy newspaper publishers.

“There are at least 10 more markets that we need to cover off,” Maymann told me. “We are giving a two-year period to break even and (launching) where we believe we can be in the top three or five in the news category in a given market.”

Although HuffPo launched in to the UK’s fiercely competitive news market minus a newspaper partner, Maymann revealed: “There has been interest from some of the players in the UK market to do a partnership after the fact.”

He told an earlier Monaco Media Forum panel: “Asia is the next tier of markets on the list. We expect to announce a partnership in Japan in the next couple of weeks. We expect to launch our first (Asian) editions beginnings of next year.

“We are negotiating in South Korea and in India. China is very interesting but also a very difficult market to do anything in unless you want to be regulated by the government, which is not the DNA of Huffington Post.”

TechCrunch is here to stay

Despite rumours, Maymann also committed AOL will retain the technology news site.

TechCrunch is a very interesting property that we have high ambitions for. We are going to see some very international growth plans for TechCrunch and it will stay in the AOL family.

“There were some hiccups and bumps on the road. But no-one is bigger than the brand and the brand is still thriving.”

Election numbers

Maymann said Huffington Post clocked 10 million unique visitors on U.S. Presidential election day. On the new HuffPo Live video initiative:

“It’s still early days. we’re still two weeks in. We’ve seen some very good early numbers.

“We will support it even more next year. We need to see the model works commercially in the U.S. before rolling it out elsewhere, but it is the plan to take it elsewhere too.”

“Across HuffPo Live, we had more than a million people taking part (on election day).”

At Monaco Media Forum, Microsoft’s advertising and online corporate VP Frank Holland said the firm was no longer just trying to sell advertisers to its web services like Bing and MSN — now the very system level of new-look Windows 8 is up for grabs as real estate. ”It’s more useful to a consumer,” Holland said. “Where the consumer finds utility, marketers want to be.”

So far, Microsoft has trialled a spot in the Accuweather app on Windows 8′s start screen for Jeep, in which the vehicle reacts to weather forecasts.

The beauty of building in ads at this OS level is more than just reaching users where they find utility, Holland said. ”We can measure when someone takes their index finger and scrolls to get to an ad, when it’s presented and how deep they get in to it. You’re getting a lot more detail in a contextually relevant sense than if you were clicking on a banner ad.

“So far, we’re sold out. These sponsorships last for three months. The next sponsors come up in February and we’re already seeing some pretty strong pipeline there.”

Skype introduced basic display banners in March 2011, two months before Microsoft announced it would buy the internet calling service. Now it, too, is moving on to new concepts.

In a later session, Skype president Tony Bates told Monaco Media Forum he would introduce “conversation ads” and “more sharing moments” that are part and parcel of Skype’s regular usage.

“We think it can go a lot further, we’re going to broaden the experience,” Bates said. ”If I want to share something with you as a friend on Skype, you’re more likely to find that very relevant and have a deeper affinity with that.”

That could be “the ability to share a customer service moment, a buying moment and so on.” “We think, in future, you could have a sponsored group or brand that would literally be a contact in Skype, and could have a meaningful connection. This is a big shift.”

So far, it’s also somewhat vague. What’s more, figuring out the pricing structure and return on investment for such a mechanism could also prove challenging. But what both Bates and Holland were speaking to was an ambition to bake advertising so deep in to their products that it is indistinguishable from utility.

“We want to be careful not to interrupt the Skype experience,” Holland said. “We don’t want to let the golden egg of two people having a conversation to turn in to anything else.”

Nevertheless, one example he is envisaging from Skype is: “Let’s design a Nike shoe together online if we happen to be in the mood to do that.”

That doesn’t sound like the kind of organic conversation that two people would ordinarily have.

But new formats matter. Microsoft this summer wrote off most of the $6.3 billion it paid to acquire online ad outfit aQuantive, many folks are freaking out about an ongoing collapse in web ad rates and others are concerned about the conventional search ads model embodied by engines like Bing is giving way to social discovery.

Now Microsoft is trying out new techniques like Xbox ads engaged with via Kinect.

Skype also has its challenges. The app is widely used but little paid-for. In last year’s S-1 filing, the outfit disclosed average monthly users currently stood at around 145 million, but only 8.8 million of them are paying users. That represents a big opportunity to monetise freeloaders, if Skype can make the right call.

In Monaco, sounding more like an ad space salesman than a VoIP operator, Skype’s Bates said what are now 218 million users clock up an average two hours and 55 minutes engagement time. Bates’ hope is to sell ad buyers on this “engagement” — but what concepts we see in reality, who knows?

Regardless, Microsoft’s Holland had a note of surprise for anyone who thought Microsoft’s main line was in making operating systems. “We’re a media company when it comes down to it,” he said.

Yet Big Apple founders are taking pride not just in rivalling but in pitching a quite different kind of online upstart, four told a Monaco Media Forum panel event on Wednesday.

Like the east-west rap feud of the 1990s, their alternative approach exposes a cultural schism that enriches the ecosystem as a whole.

Tumblr founder David Karp said:

“The industry in New York right now would like to be known for having different sensibilities.

“The west is about making things scale but not making people’s lives better. It is about indexing, but not about creating.”

Speaking on the same panel, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti agreed:

“If you’re building a pure technology company, Silicon Valley is still the best place to do it. People there are still nerds; pure technology. But sometimes that hurts them when they need knowledge of a specific field.”

The reality is becoming clear to these folks that a different and more diverse, alternative startup to Silicon Valley’s all-engineering lifestyle is what differentiates east from west.

Thrillist’s Ben Lerer. Photo: Monaco Mediax ©

It draws not just from mathematics but from publishing, music, film, design and more. And it’s not just culture, Katie Beauchamp, founder of fashion-content-commerce cross-over Birchbox, told the Monaco Media Forum panel: ”Companies in New York are being founded with business models at the outset.”

All of which is all very well. New York is developing just fine with this relatively touchy-feely bent. But Tumblr’s Karp said New York can compete effectively, even for straight-up Valley engineering talent:

“We thought it would be an up-hill climb to convince these guys to pick up their families and move to the east coast. But we’ve found it easy to leverage.

“You’ve got all these big networks on equal footing — Twitter, Facebook and Google pulling people with very similar offerings — Palo Alto is a very similar community.

“When we show up at the end of that process and say ‘Before you make up your mind on Facebook or Google, spend a weekend with us in New York’, it puts us on a totally different footing. We show them an opportunity that’s as intriguing to them as in Silicon Valley – but in a much better city.”

Thrillist founder Ben Lerer told the same panel: “From a recruiting standpoint – people want to live in New York City.”

That is also rubbing off on investors who, traditionally, had eyes only for California, Karp said:

“West Coast VCs are starting to spend a lot more time out in New York. We’re now getting people from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock and Sequoia come over. They come to New York and they make a week of it… they hang out with us over the weekend doing something cool.”

This buzz is being amplified with Cornell’s Chelsea Technion facility, but was already fully in bloom despite such initiatives. These programmes concentrate interests, but a city so rich and relatively diverse can provide welcome distractions from the Valley’s tech bubble, Tumblr’s Karp told Monaco Media Forum:

“One really great characteristic of New York is that, after work, you’re not going out and hanging out with people in your industry.

“Walking down the street, seeing everyone with the Dropbox or Facebook T-shirt… they’re building something for themselves rather than, as in New York, for communities of tens of millions of people.

“The west coast feels like a race, whereas, in New York, you’re surrounded by passionate people rather than this hypercompetitive air on the west coast.”

BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti. Photo: Monaco Mediax ©

Karp said 50 percent of Tumblr staff were relocators. Of around 60 engineers, a dozen were candidates to join the Valley’s Facebook, Google and Twitter during recruitment. “We’re able to show them a similar opportunity in a better city,” he said.

BuzzFeed’s Peretti suggested that the east coast’s particular flavor of tech boom is now happening because non-technology folk are harnessing increasingly accessible technologies atop their specialist fields to enact niche disruptions:

“As technology becomes cheaper and easier to deploy, you’re seeing people already passionate about these fields in New York building new technology companies in these technology verticals.”

New York may be shooting for a different goal than Palo Alto but, within its own game, hasn’t yet achieved equivalent success, Thrillist’s Lerer noted:

“I think it would be nice if we had some big exits like the Valley.

“The goal is to build really big, important tech companies – the west coast has consistently done that. New York is starting to do that. Tumblr will have some nice eventuality where people will be able to say ‘New York is great’.”

Karp said:

“There are things we’d love to put us on the map to validate us further — but we don’t want to cross over as ‘Valley Jr.’ but as a whole different genre where products and technologies get made.”

»  Slideshows are both the “scourge and savior” of online journalism — for the moment. Advertisers are willing to turn a blind eye to the fact that all the pageviews that slideshows deliver to their ads are based on a few unique visitors, but at some point, the model will hit a level of diminishing returns as effectiveness inevitably wanes. [CJR]

»  Some at the Web 2.0 Summit fear that the days of startups having the chance to strike it rich and change the culture is coming to an end as a small oligarchy of digital media companies takes greater and greater control of the internet. [MercuryNews]

»  The U.S government would be able to block foreign websites that sell counterfeit goods and pirated content, if a bill passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee gets full Congressional approval. [Reuters]

»  Chris Ahearn, president of media at Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI) hinted at greater U.S. expansion of its news coverage and features at last week’s Monaco Media Forum. [Beet.tv]

»  Document sharing site Scribd has unveiled a new analytics tool that promises uploaders a comprehensive set of stats detailing what portions of their content readers are gravitating to. [Techcrunch]

The News Corp. heir apparent is keenly focused on that principle, with emphasis on dual revenue streams through advertising and subscription throughout his part of the media empire and on retrans fees in the U.S..A few examples from the on-stage interview conducted by UBS’s Aryeh Bourkoff (we’ll post the video when it’s up):

– ‘Flagship’ apps: “Our flasgship newspaper products are now the iPad apps,” Murdoch said, and they pose a greater risk. “Tthe problem with the apps is they’re much more directly cannabilistic of the core print product than the web site.” He added, “People interact more. They don’t dip in and out. The key is to get the advertising yields” to be the same. Combine that with the lower production costs, and the business model for apps could be highly attractive.

– Retrans: Without referring to the recent dispute that kept Fox and some of its cable networks off Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) for two weeks, Murdoch stressed the company’s belief in retrans fees: “We’re investing an enormous amount in this product and we see absolutely no shame in asking for a better price for it.”

– Wrong metrics: Murdoch said when he started to get involved in the digital news side, he was astonished to find the focus on the wrong metrics — the kind that don’t translate directly into money — and a battle with competitors that ultimately was meaningless. “You’re both losing money.” (That doesn’t stop his father, Rupert Murdoch, from gloating over said metrics when he can.)

– BSkyB: Why does News Corp. want all of BSkyB? (NYSE: BSY) Murdoch didn’t come at that directly but talked about the opportunities he sees in a business that he still believes is in its infancy, despite being around for a couple of decades.

– Cord cutting & programming costs: Murdoch ascribes the recent drop in cable subscription numbers to the round of discounting last year as U.S. cable operators tried to move subs to digital, not to cord cutting. As for going a la carte online, he said people may be surprised by how expensive it could get given how much the programmers spend on content. “There is no new technology that makes athletes not greedy,” he said, piling it on a little by adding that Wayne Rooney doesn’t play for free because he loves football and would skip the sports cars. He couldn’t resist adding, “Computer graphics are supposed to be cheaper. Avatar was not cheap.”

The full video, embedded below. The full videos from the conference are here on YouTube.