We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Other weird things were happening back then too: People still got much of their news from television and newspapers, and they learned about major events after they had already happened.

There have been some huge shifts since 2002: Tablets and smartphones are now ubiquitous, lots of people read on their digital devices, and just about everyone is part of a social network or three. This summer is the tenth anniversary of our launch. In an effort to gain some perspective on the past decade in digital media, I’ve been reading back through paidContent’s archives — a collection of over 80,000 posts.

Since I was only a freshman in college when paidContent came to life, I often didn’t know, as I read through the stories from the early days, how things had begun or how they turned out. As I watched them unfold, I wanted to grab our readers’ arms and give them advice (“Don’t buy that Zune!” “Invest in Facebook!” “Go for the good Twitter handle now!”). But I also realized how difficult it is to predict success.

Some takeaways from my trip through the archives:  Some companies — AOL and Yahoo come to mind — have been consistently bad at predicting what consumers want. And a couple of companies, namely Apple and Amazon, have been very good at it. Also, being a native digital company helps, but it’s no guarantee of success (what up, MySpace?). And after all these years, it’s still not clear what content customers will pay for, or how much they’ll pay.

Streaming and Moviebeaming

What do analysts, CEOs and bloggers have in common? None of us can predict the future. Roger Ebert joked in 2002 that “on-demand streaming movies on the Web, like HDTV, are five years in the future — and will be for at least another 10 years.”

If Disney’s Moviebeam had been the only game in town, Ebert probably would have been right. When it launched in three cities in 2003, customers paid $6.99 a month to use a device that could hold 100 movies and plugged into the back of a TV set. They also had to pay for each movie they watched– billing was done via the phone line. The company went through various unsuccessful iterations before India’s Valuable Group bought it in 2008. It was never heard from again.

Netflix almost went down the same road. It had a plan to release a Moviebeam-like “proprietary set-top box with an Internet connection that could download movies overnight.” But instead, it decided to forge ahead with streaming — starting with a complicated “quota hours” system in 2007 and moving to unlimited streaming in 2008. By 2010, the majority of subscribers were streaming something, and the company began offering streaming-only subscriptions, though CEO Reed Hastings said that same year that the company would keep shipping DVDs until 2030. (We’ll see about that.)

ABC was the first network to sell episodes of its shows on iTunes, back in 2006, and to stream shows free with ads on ABC.com — and later on AOL. But by the time premium subscription service Hulu Plus launched in 2010, the platforms getting the attention were devices with built-in access, like Internet-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, and tablets.

Return of the living dead

Speaking of AOL: It’s something of a miracle that the company still exists. In 2000, when it merged with Time Warner, it was valued at $350 billion, and the next year, more than 24 million people in the U.S. were paying for its Internet access service. By the end of last year, that number had dwindled to just 3.3 million subscribers. Here’s a quick recap of some of AOL’s miscues over the years:

• AOL Voicemail ($5.95 per month)
• A teen service called Red (featuring “a talking head—using the image of an actual employee—that uses software to answer users’ questions”)
• A digital music partnership with Burger King
• A reality show called “Gold Rush”
• Social networking site AIM Pages
• Going free
• The hyperlocal Patch blogs

Though AOL was once a high flier, no other company ever liked it quite enough to buy it. Google bought a five-percent, $1 billion stake in AOL in 2005, leading analysts to wonder if Microsoft missed out. That resulted in a $726 million writedown in 2009. Time Warner bought back Google’s stake and finally spun off “the albatross” in December 2009.  AOL is still promising a bounceback. “The executive team expects a profitable content business by next year,” CEO Tim Armstrong said in May 2011.

Yahoo hasn’t fared much better. The company launched Yahoo Platinum in 2003; for $9.95 a month, subscribers got access to audio and videos.  The program was dead by October of that same year. It later tried a Twitter-wannabe microblogging service (“Meme…where you share everything that you find that’s interesting,”). Perhaps the smartest move Yahoo ever made was not buying AOL.

Where did these companies go wrong? In 2010, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin pondered that question in an interview with the New York Times . The AOL-Time Warner deal was “undone by the Internet itself,” he said. “I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content?”

Know what’s cool? A billion dollars

In 2006, an RBC Capital analyst estimated that a certain social networking company would be worth $15 billion in a few years, based on “raw, unprecedented user/usage growth.”

Six years later, Facebook went public with a valuation of $104 billion. Too bad the analyst wasn’t talking about Facebook but about MySpace. The social networking company that Rupert Murdoch acquired for $580 million in 2005 sold for just $35 million in 2011.

Why did Facebook soar while MySpace — and other social networking services like Friendster — sank? It allowed people to build real connections using their actual personal information, and rolled out a product that was ready to scale and had good technology. Other companies realized sharing was important too — in 2005, Yahoo SVP Jeff Weiner called sharing “the next chapter of the World Wide Web” — but Facebook was able to implement it in a way that kept users coming back. The site surpassed Yahoo and AOL for “stickiness” in 2009, when Nielsen found users spending an average of four hours and thirty-nine minutes a month on Facebook.

Social has already disrupted some industries — witness the rise of Twitter and the way it has changed the way news is reported, with stories like Osama Bin Laden’s assassination breaking there first. In a sign of the importance of these emerging platforms, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are launching “Everywhere” initiatives to deliver news to readers where they are already hanging out.

Fast food and music don’t mix

Hard to believe it now, but there was real skepticism that iTunes’ 99-cent songs would be able to compete with peer-to-peer file-sharing services. “According to academics who’ve studied the economics of digital music distribution,” we wrote in 2003, the year iTunes launched, “the cost still seems too high to attract users of peer-to-peer file trading services.” The piece cited an economist who believed “the appropriate price of a downloaded song is 18 cents.” In fact, Real Networks dropped its song prices to $0.49 in an attempt to compete against Apple.

In the end, consumers choose selection and convenience over P2P networks. We called iTunes “a kickstart for the micropayments industry.” Was it? While Steve Jobs said in 2004 that Apple wouldn’t hit its one-year, 100 million songs downloaded goal, global digital music sales crossed $1.1 billion in 2006. In April 2008, Apple surpassed Walmart  as the largest music seller in the United States.

The company that arguably started the digital music revolution — Napster — didn’t survive. Once it no longer offered “free,” it was done, though it tried to reincarnate itself: launching a mobile music service, “Napster To Go,” with AT&T in 2004 (the one smartphone that supported it could hold up to 6 songs), partnering with Circuit City on a digital music store, getting itself acquired by Best Buy in 2008 ,and then being bought back by Rhapsody in 2011. Unfortunately, Rhapsody was already losing out to newer (and free) streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

The partnerships with Circuit City and Best Buy, though, were probably the kiss of death. One of the big trends of the past 10 years has been brick-and-mortar retail stores’ consistent failure to compete effectively against digital-native companies. Best Buy wasn’t the only retailer to try to crack the digital-content business — and fail: Target and Sears both took a shot. And McDonald’s sold digital content over its WiFi network and even tried DVD rentals in its restaurants.

Do you like the feel of paper?

Just as digital music didn’t really take off until Apple introduced the iPod, the ebook revolution didn’t take place until the arrival of the Kindle. In paidContent’s early years, ebooks were written off as a failure in part because publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with DRM. (In 2003, “temporary electronic ink” that would disappear after a few months was floated as a possible solution.) Barnes & Noble decided to stop selling ebooks in 2003, and Yahoo stopped selling them in 2004.

Meanwhile, Amazon and Google were pushing forward. Google launched Google Print – now called Google Book Search, and still besieged by lawsuits seven years later. Amazon tested two now-defunct programs: Amazon Pages, which allowed customers to buy access to digital copies of select pages from books, and Amazon Upgrade, which bundled print books with online access to the complete work.

Customers weren’t biting. Then Amazon came out with the Kindle in 2007 for $399. Less than two years later, Amazon was selling more Kindle books than print books, and ebooks now make up over 20 percent of some big-six publishers’ sales. Barnes & Noble has had some success with its Nook e-reader and digital bookstore, but bankrupt Borders shuttered all its stores in 2011. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five big publishers for allegedly colluding to set e-book prices drags on.

Good thing Steve Jobs looked beyond ringtones

A Forbes survey back in 2002 found that “business professionals” would be willing to pay for “news content to be delivered to their cellular devices,” and some media companies tried early mobile experiments. Verizon offered a cell phone version of the Yellow Pages — which, at $19.95 per year, gained 15,000 subscribers in three months. But starting in 2004, everyone decided the future was in ringtones. A $4 billion global business by the end of the year, one company projected.

So, so many ringtones. You could buy them from Rolling Stone or from an ATM-like device called E2Go. A fall 2004 marketing campaign let you mix your own ringtones on Levi’s website. Billboard launched a top ringtones chart.

Could ringtones “prove to be a passing fad”? we wondered late in 2004. Luckily, yes — a new technology came along to shake up the mobile market. No, it wasn’t the $500 ESPN phone, but the iPhone, which came out in 2007. And by opening its platform up to third-party app developers, Apple got users ready for its next ecosystem-changing device, the iPad, in 2010.

Monetizing mobile

Advertising has always been a fuzzy business — how exactly do you measure engagement and success? Well, that’s still the big debate about advertising in the digital era.  ”If here’s anything that’s really holding back ad spending on the web, it’s the lack of good measurements,” Tim Armstrong, then Google’s VP of national sales, said in 2007.

Mobile advertising has also faced obstacles. In 2006, mobile carriers began allowing advertising despite fears of annoying customers. Customers were indeed annoyed – 79 percent of them found mobile advertising annoying, according to a 2007 Forrester study — but they could “see the potential benefits of mobile advertising and marketing to themselves,” particularly if they could get a useful special offer or coupon.

Further complicating matters for advertisers: The smartphone market is fragmented among different brands — marketers don’t want to spend the money to create different ads for Android and iOS — and there are two mobile ad universes: mobile browser and apps.

Nevertheless, mobile advertising has gained ground, crossing  $1 billion in the U.S. for the first time in 2011, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, totaling $1.6 billion for the year.

The next opportunity is social media advertising. And once again, it will be a challenge to figure out some standardized metrics. What’s a retweet worth, anyways?

Back to where we all began

Though micropayments worked well for music when Apple launched iTunes, the path to payments for written content has been rockier. In 2004, we wrote that “micropayments today are still characterized by a large number of competing transaction types” – including direct-to-bill, merchant aggregation, prepaid accounts and direct transfer – and “each of these face the current incumbent in digital content distribution: the flat-fee subscription model.”

Eight years later, it appears that the subscription model has won out. The iPad opened the door for magazine and newspaper publishers to create new revenue selling content on that platform, but the results have been mixed. When Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily” iPad newspaper launched in early 2011, the company called it “the model for how stories are told and consumed.” We wrote, “The bet here is that while consumers are less and less likely to reach into their pocket for a few quarters to buy a newspaper, they might not care about the 14 cents on their credit card for a copy of an e-newspaper.” A year and a half later, The Daily has over 100,000 paying subscribers — but it’s living on borrowed time and may not get through the five years its publisher has said it needs to break even.

Writing for the web, of course, has been around for awhile. At the beginning of the decade, blogging was called “nanopublishing,” and the question was how blogs could support themselves doing it. All sorts of models have arisen. For example, Gawker tried a licensing deal with Yahoo, but that relationship ended a year later. The deal “garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton said in 2006.

Some bloggers have stayed independent and make a living from advertising (or from their day job); others write their blogs under a newspaper, website or larger magazine’s umbrella — see the Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, WaPo’s Ezra Klein. Or, they go to work for the Huffington Post!

Magazine companies have grappled with whether to bundle digital editions with print subscriptions or charge for them separately. Time Inc. — which first put digital editions of its magazines behind AOL’s paywall in 2003 — started out charging separately, but today Time Inc. and Condé Nast print subscribers get the digital edition free. Hearst, meanwhile, is charging separately, and it said its digital business in the U.S. became “solidly profitable” for the first time in 2011.

Could there ever be a Netflix for magazines? Time tried it for print versions with its 2008 Maghound service. It failed, due to a lack of marketing and reader interest. Magazine publishers are trying again with joint venture Next Issue Media.

Many newspaper publishers, most notably the New York Times, tried paywalls at the start of the decade and then abandoned them – only to return to the model in the past couple years.  In its most recent earnings report, the NYT said it has 454,000 digital subscribers. Is that enough to sustain the newspaper in its 21st-century transition?  Probably the best answer to that came from  Vivian Schiller. But it was in response not to the NYT’s recent digital subscriber numbers, but to the NYT’s decision in 2004 to close the paper’s first paywall, known as TimesSelect. Schiller, then the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, was asked whether TimesSelect had worked.  “It did work,” she said. “It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

Birthday cake photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Robyn Mackenzie].

TV photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Somchai Buddha].

Zombie hand photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [lineartestpilot].

Piggybank photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [cardiae]

Fast food photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Sergio Martinez].

Book photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [TrotzOlga].

Ringtones and apps photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [violetkaipa].

Cash register photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [titelio].

Magazines photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [bernashafo].

The cost of freedom for Comcast and NBC Universal: roughly $300 million, with “a portion of the total price” coming from the JV’s “past profits,” according to the New York Times. The careful wording makes it a little difficult to be sure whether or not that means the 50-50 JV should be valued at $600 million.

Microsoft and Comcast agreed to the split Friday, according to the NYT; in its own news story, NBCNews.com reported that many details have yet to be worked out. But the biggest hurdle was cleared, allowing NBC News to rebrand the site immediately.

The NBCNews.com story avoids financial details, but tries to get the value across:

In addition, while msnbc.com has never publicly reported revenue figures, independent industry studies have called it the most profitable news website in the United States. NBCUniversal will now collect those profits.

NBC News plans

NBCNews.com will become part of a new division known as NBC News Digital, which will be led by Vivian Schiller — hired as chief digital officer last year following her departure as president and CEO of National Public Radio. Charlie Tillinghast will remain as president and publisher of the rechristened site; he was one of the first publicly to suggest that it was time to think of changing the name and control. The divergence in the network and the digital operation became more stark as MSNBC TV turned more toward political talk TV and msnbc.com kept its news-centric mission, but the two remained tied in branding.

In the process, NBC News is giving up its lock as the exclusive news provider on MSN but it is also gaining the right to make new deals of its own. It’s not an immediate risk; the network says it will take at least two years to unwind everything and that MSN will continue to send traffic to the news site. MSN also will continue to sell the site’s advertising for now to avoid any disruption, according to NBCNews.com. The MSNBC digital network drew nearly 50 million unique visitors in June, according to ComScore; MSN accounts for about half of that.

In an editor’s note announcing the change, NBCNews.com promised that MSNBC TV will launch a site in 2013 that will be “an extension of the MSNBC TV on-air brand, creating in-depth content and a community for the passionate audiences of MSNBC programs.” In a way, that makes MSNBC more like a traditional cable channel than it was at its cross-platform start. That URL will redirect for now but eventually will become a separate site for the cable news network.

When the two started to unwind the cable TV part of their partnership in 2005, giving NBC Universal a controlling interest and bringing MSNBC TV into the NBC News fold, the digital joint venture remained intact. NBC News President Steve Capus said the partnership “keeps us on the leading edge in the online world.” That was when digital was pennies to NBCU.

Now it’s real money. Capus told the NYT:

“It’s undeniable how big a part of all of our businesses the digital properties are going to be. We think we have a much better opportunity to shape them, and frankly grow the news division over all, if we have direct control over all of it.”

The crew producing NBCNews.com will stay on the Microsoft campus in Redmond for now; eventually, they will move to new office space in Seattle. Production will shift to New York, according to the NYT but NBCU is promising to build an “NBC News Innovation Center” in Seattle for developers. The NBCNews.com version makes it sound like editorial staff will stay in Seattle as well. (I’m checking on that and will update.)

Capus told NBCNews.com that the startups acquired by MSNBC.com — BreakingNews.com, Newsvine.com and EveryBlock.com — aren’t likely to face major changes.

MSN plans its own news unit

MSNBC’s digital journalists fought from the beginning to be viewed independently as a news organization despite the Microsoft connection. Now MSN is hiring for a fall launch of its own news unit, although how large it will be is unclear. GM Bob Visse told the NYT, ““we’re going to go out and build a world-class news team.” He also said the portal will make new distribution deals.

Visse told NBCNews.com:

“If you start thinking about what we’re going to be doing in Windows 8 and the Bing app and what we’re going to be doing … across the multiple platforms, it makes a lot of sense for Microsoft. We’re talking about using technology and using data to solve information delivery and news delivery in new and innovative ways.”

That’s “really difficult” when there’s an exclusive relationship with one news provider, Visse said.

That’s probably even more difficult when much of the 16 years of a site has been defined by trying to show its independence. I wrote about this a decade ago when msnbc.com was being rebranded to show more of its MSN connection. At the time, two-thirds of msnbc.com’s traffic came from MSN — and there was a strong sense from both partners that the portal relationship was needed for the site to survive and thrive.

While ABC News has increased its ties to Yahoo to take advantage of the portal relationship, NBCNews.com now sees independence and control as the key to its own future.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Politics used to be a very controlled and almost theatrical process, with politicians and other political actors appearing in carefully scripted events — and the reporting and analysis of those events was also restricted to certain specific media channels: a couple of TV networks, one or two major newspapers, and so on. Now that we have blogs and Twitter and other forms of social media, how has that changed the nature of both the political process and the media reporting of that process? At paidContent 2012 in New York recently, I asked Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall and NBC News digital head Vivian Schiller for their perspective on that question and you can hear their answers in the video embedded below.

Marshall, the editor and publisher of the ground-breaking political blog network, said that social media has really just accelerated the process of breaking down those traditional barriers — a process that started with the arrival of blogs about a decade ago:

I see it as a progression over the past dozen or so years, of a more and more frictionless news cycle, and what we’re today calling social media has just accelerated that. The other major transformation is an increase in key vectors in the news — the way the New York Times used to be a dominant vector in how news was propagated, along with the big TV networks and other big metropolitan dailies. With the growth of blogs and the beginnings of social media, you have a more fluid and unstable ecosystem of news.

Schiller, who was previously CEO at National Public Radio before joining NBC’s news division, said that for a media entity like NBC, social media has a way of amplifying the stories that come up in other formats. For three weeks in a row, she said, comments that politicians — including Cory Booker, Jamie Dimon and Joe Biden — made on the TV program Meet The Press became a national story thanks to the power of social media. “Meet The Press is about as old media as you can get,” said Schiller. “But those events ricocheted around the world — that’s social media.”

Both the panelists also said that one of the positive things about social media and its role in the news and political ecosystem is that some events that are trivial or unworthy of attention can “burn out” more quickly when they are exposed to the glare of Twitter and the blogosphere, whereas they might have taken on a life of their own and dominated the discussion in newspapers or on TV networks before social media. And Schiller said despite the fact that Twitter and other forms of social media can be filled with a lot of worthless noise, overall the impact has been positive for both politics and the media as a whole:

Of course there’s a lot of garbage in social media, but there’s a lot of garbage in every form of media, from the beginning of time. But I think that all of the kinds of access and the ways people can interact with content, for politics, it’s all good.

Marshall appeared with Vivian Schiller, chief digital officer of NBC News at the paidContent 2012 conference, where the two talked about how social media has influenced and reshaped the news business. Marshall said social media is part of a larger continuum that began with the Internet and the rise of blogs. With social media, he said, the news business has become frictionless and fluid and, in some cases, chaotic. But it’s helped wrest control away from traditional news powers and helped do away with the notion of a news cycle.

“Parties and counter-parties can get back into a story rapidly, whether it’s on Twitter or this or that.  It’s about immediate access so a story can play out without the slow down of a news cycle,” Marshall said.

Vivian Schiller said social media has become an organic part of news organizations, which are finding that it can be a liberating force, providing new ways to engage their audience and also push out content. She said social media is also helpful in weeding out trivial news, while allowing more voices to be heard on bigger stories.

“I think because there’s so many people who have access to the same information, you get more data points and more information  from the crowd and more debunking.  And everything becomes meatier,” Schiller said.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

All of us at GigaOM and our sister site paidContent are into the final planning stages for our big media show on May 23 — paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads. As paidContent editor and conference chair Staci Kramer has described in her posts leading up to the conference, we’re going to be looking at a wide range of topics related to the disruption in the media industry, from newspapers to e-books, with a great lineup of speakers including Media News Group CEO Jim Paton, Vox Media founder Jim Bankoff and Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne. I’m looking forward to all of those sessions, but I’m also really looking forward to the two I’m moderating: an interview with Union Square Ventures partner and Twitter investor Fred Wilson and a panel with Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall and Vivian Schiller of NBC News.

More than perhaps anyone else, Fred Wilson has been ahead of the curve when it comes to the potential of social media such as Twitter as a disruptive force both for the web and for traditional media as a whole — a track record that arguably began many years ago with his investment in GeoCities, an early web community that was acquired by Yahoo in 1999 for $3.57 billion. Since then, Wilson and Union Square have invested in a number of other prominent social networking players, including Zynga, design community Etsy.com, Foursquare, MeetUp and of course Twitter.

While Wilson hasn’t invested in anything that is specifically focused on media, you could argue (and I have) that Twitter is getting awfully close to being a media entity, if it isn’t already. Although virtually all of its content is produced by users, Twitter still has media-like aspects, including the ability to censor tweets if necessary. More recently, the company has been adding “curation”-type features thanks in part to its acquisition of Summify, and also hiring editors to create editorial products with partners, such as the one Twitter just announced with Nascar.

The Union Square partner has also said that the world of technology and the world of media need to figure out how to help each other, and I’m looking forward to asking him more about what he means by that. In a blog post, he confessed to being a reluctant pirate when it comes to trying to watch certain sporting events that he couldn’t find legal access to — so I’d like to know how he would advise media companies to handle traditional functions like time-based “windowing” and geo-blocking in a digital era.

What’s the impact of real-time media on politics?

On the political front, we’ve seen over the past year or so how the real-time nature of the social web can play havoc with political campaigns and spin doctors. Not only can the candidates themselves post their thoughts on Twitter or Facebook — an example of what web veteran and blogging pioneer Dave Winer has called “the sources going direct” — but those comments can snowball to the point where they take over the entire political agenda, as Hilary Rosen’s remarks about Mitt Romney’s wife being a stay-at-home mother did just a few weeks ago.

Whether this is a positive thing or a negative thing for the broader political and social sphere is something I’m planning to ask Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Vivian Schiller, the head of digital for NBC News and the former CEO of National Public Radio. Are we just seeing a more high-speed version of the same spin cycle we’ve seen for years, or has social media changed the balance of power for the better? What is the impact of meme-trackers such as BuzzFeed, which has added a lot of political firepower with former Politico writer Ben Smith and others, or The Huffington Post (whose co-founder Jonah Peretti is also at paidContent 2012)?

One thing we know for sure is that the world has changed in some fundamental ways thanks to the power of the web and of social media like Twitter: since anyone can be a publisher or a journalist — even for a short time — with the push of a button, we now have an unprecedented ability to see and hear what is happening in places like Tahrir Square in Egypt or Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. Politicians like former deputy British prime minister Lord Prescott say Twitter gives them “a connection to millions” without having to go through the “distorted prism” of the traditional media.

What the future holds for media companies and for society as a whole remains to be seen, but there’s no question we are going through a time of almost unprecedented disruption. I’m looking forward to hearing what Fred Wilson, Josh Marshall and Vivian Schiller — and all of the other great speakers at paidContent 2012 — have to say about that future. Please join me at the Times Center in New York on Wednesday, May 23.

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Nony Mata

• On Friday, Facebook is set to flip the switch from years of hyped speculation to the reality of a mega-hyped IPO. It’s waiting for regulatory approval to spend $1 billion on Instagram. As I write this, the news is breaking that Pinterest is about raise a round that will follow it at $1.5 billion. A quick scan of our own news pages shows hundreds of millions being invested in the digital content ecosystem — often with a firm belief that there is revenue somewhere to justify those investments, but without any real sense of where it will come from. We’ll ask John Borthwick and Fred Wilson, among others, where they are investing and why.
• Cable and broadcast networks have been unveiling new programming slates into a more fragmented video universe than ever before. Discovery Communications bought Revision 3 for $30 million, Turner Broadcasting invested in Funny or Die. At the same time, YouTube’s $100 million investment in original programming is rolling out channel by channel, AOL is finally moving ahead with its major video plans, Yahoo is investing in original programs with Tom Hanks, Katie Couric and others — and so are Hulu, Amazon and Netflix. Brian Bedol, who is trying to replicate his success as a cable network founder with YouTube channels and other efforts; Lisa Gersh, president and COO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and Rob Burnett, CEO of David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants, will take us inside their thinking as they make their way through The Video Boom.
• Just this week, one of our moderators turned from board member and adjunct professor to active exec again. That means Larry Kramer will be sitting down as president and publisher of USA Today with John Paton and Jim Bankoff to talk about what it takes to lead and innovate, to be a “new publisher.” Since paidContent 2011, Bankoff taken SB Nation, a network of sports sites, to Vox Media and added a tech vertical with The Verge and has a gaming vertical on the way. Paton, meanwhile, has added MediaNews to his Journal Register portfolio, and is now the the CEO of the much-larger DigitalFirst.

As much as things change, one goal remains the same: the creation and evolution of sustainable business models that will support quality media, entertainment and information across platforms.

We’ll be covering the topics that matter to you in our signature one-day, single-stage, 360-degree style. We have a stellar roster of speakers and moderators who are more than up for the task, including:

• Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer, News Corp.
• Bob Sauerberg, President, Condé Nast
• Vivian Schiller, Chief Digital Officer, NBC News
• Josh Marshall, Editor & Publisher, TalkingPointsMemo.com
• Mark Johnson, CEO, Zite
• Matt Mullenweg, Founding Developer, WordPress and Founder, Automattic

The full list of confirmed speakers is here.

Just as important as the speakers, though, is the fact that we have great attendees with a lot to add to the discussion.

But space is limited and tickets are selling fast — so if you want to take full advantage of this jam-packed agenda and the opportunities that come with networking throughout the day from breakfast to closing cocktails, I strongly suggest you register now.

If you’re interested in sponsoring paidContent 2012, please contact eventsales@gigaom.com.

Two NBCUniversal execs — Lauren Zalaznick, chairman of entertainment and digital networks and integrated media, and Nick Lehman, president of digital — will co-chair the new digital advisory board. Board members include:

Amy Banse, Managing Director and Head of Funds at Comcast Ventures; LeahBusque, Founder, TaskRabbit; Beth Ferreira, COO of Fab.com;  Cindy Gallop, Founder & CEO of IfWeRanTheWorld; Megan Gardner, CEO of Plum District; Jennifer Hyman, CEO & Co-Founder of Rent the Runway;  Nancy Lublin, CEO of Do Something;  Nasreen Madhany, Global CEO of Neo@Ogilvy; Marissa Mayer, VP of Location and Local Services at Google ; Heidi S. Messer, Co-Founder & Chairman of Collective [i];  Alison Pincus, Co-Founder & Chief Partnership Officer of One Kings Lane; Amanda Richman, President, Digital of MediaVest USA; Jessica Schell, EVP of New Media and Digital Entertainment at Universal Pictures; Vivian Schiller, SVP & Chief Digital Officer at NBC News;  Chloe Sladden, VP of Media, Twitter; Colleen Soriano, SVP & Managing Partner, US Director of Digital Communications, Universal McCann; Rachel Sterne, Chief Digital Officer for the City of New York; Alexa von Tobel, Founder and CEO of LearnVest.com; Joanne Zaiac, President of Digitas NY Region.

Women at NBCU board members Gilt Group Chairman, Susan Lyne; iVillage President, Jodi Kahn; tech entrepreneur/investor, Esther Dyson; and Monica Halpert, former CMO of Bluefly, are joining the digital extension as well.

Amy Banse, managing director and head of funds at Comcast Ventures, will be speaking at paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads in NYC on May 23. Register today.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock user [Mehmet Dilhiz].

Sure, newspaper revenues are tanking and layoffs are happening. And there’s no doubt that there is pain and chaos everywhere else in the industry. Radio, television and magazines — all are facing trying times. But as people say, amidst chaos lies opportunity. Over the past few years, we’ve seen mobile devices like smartphones and tablets explode and the emergence of e-paper, astonishing new screens, global distribution platforms, new payment systems such as Amazon and Apple’s stores, and social amplifiers like Facebook and Twitter. We are in the forest after a downpour, and we are ready for new ideas to mushroom.

I admit there are more questions than answers at this point, but these questions are the raw material we can use to write a better script for tomorrow’s content business. These threats and, more importantly, opportunities will be part of the discourse at paidContent 2012, which will be held on May 23, 2012, at the TimesCenter in New York City.

Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures

In conversations with industry leaders such as Bob Saureberg of Conde Nast, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures (an investor in revolutionary companies such as Kickstarter and Twitter) and Amy Banse of Comcast, conference chair and paidContent editor Staci Kramer — along with GigaOM senior writer Mathew Ingram — will ponder the future of the business. No surprise, Staci has labeled this conference: At the crossroads. Here is the schedule. (Click here to register.)

Other speakers at the event include Vivian Schiller of NBC News, Lisa Gersh of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Jon Miller of News Corp., John Borthwick of Betaworks, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress/Automattic and Anil Dash of Expert Labs. Read the full list of speakers here.

I am looking forward to this event and figuring out the future of the industry I love so much.

Schiller’s responsibilities include “strategic oversight of the network’s digital extensions on the web and in mobile, interaction with the joint venture that oversees the msnbc.com digital network, as well as providing direction to the network’s new emerging properties such as EducationNation.com and theGrio.com.”

At NBC News, it means a change for Mark Lukasiewicz, VP for news specials and digital, who will now focus more on specials and major event coverage.

It’s also a significant shift for Schiller, the former SVP and GM of NYTimes.com (NYSE: NYT) who spent two years as the very public head of NPR. Schiller won kudos for the way she revamped NPR, particularly her leadership on the digital side, but resigned when controversies, including the firing of Juan Williams and a conservative “sting”, threatened the nonprofit’s public funding and overshadowed those pluses.

Here’s how Capus announced the hiring to his staff:

Colleagues,

We are excited to announce that Vivian Schiller is joining NBC News in a new role as Chief Digital Officer. Vivian comes to us with a wealth of experience in the digital field and will be a great asset to this organization as we advance our strategy and expand our capabilities. This addition to the team will free up some time for Mark Lukasiewicz as he continues to excel in the planning and execution of NBC News specials, political debates, election coverage and big events. In addition, Vivian will give guidance and management to various digital initiatives around the entire organization … supporting the efforts of our talented executives and producers like Cheryl Gould, David Wilson, Bonnie Optekman and Ryan Osborn.

This announcement is just the beginning of what will be a great new venture for this organization, and I look forward to watching us grow and innovate in this space.

Steve

(I first heard this Monday evening but held off barring confirmation. Peter Kafka reported Tuesday that talks were underway.)

The NPR board announced Schiller’s resignation this morning, a day after a video “sting” of chief fundraiser Ron Schiller (no relation) hit. In the surreptitious video of him talking to two purported Muslim donors, who were fakes, Ron Schiller said federal funding shouldn’t be needed for public radio and called some Tea Party supporters “seriously racist, racist people.” Ron Schiller also admitted the importance of federal funding and refused a (fake) $5 million donation from the pair. He had already announced that he was leaving NPR for another job in May; his resignation was made effective immediately.

Vivian Schiller hung on with just the loss of a bonus after the board inquiry of how Juan Williams was fired; top news exec Ellen Weiss resigned following the review. But the aftereffects of the Williams’ firing lingered. Monday, after a speech with stirring examples of NOR news coverage, Schiller was peppered with questions about Williams — and conservative political activist/video con man (or sting “artist”, as some like to call him), James O’Keefe has said he went after NPR because of Williams. The commentator has been at Fox News with a higher salary since the firing.

From the NPR board: Board Chairman Dave Edwards said, “The Board accepted Vivian’s resignation with understanding, genuine regret and great respect for her leadership of NPR these past two years.”

According to a CEO succession plan in place since 2009, Joyce Slocum, SVP of Legal Affairs and General Counsel, will be Interim CEO during the search process.

Update: Vivian Schiller offered her resignation last night and the board accepted. She told the NYT , “I’m hopeful that my departure from NPR will have the intended effect of easing the defunding pressure on public broadcasting.” Edwards described the decision as difficult both for her and the board, noting her leadership during tough economic times and in reframing NPR for today’s media landscape. She also wasn’t personally responsible for many of the mistakes — but, as Edwards and Schiller both note, being a CEO means taking responsibility.

Will her departure lessen the pressure on federal funding – a relatively small but significant (vital in some cases) contribution to NPR and its member stations — or change any attitudes towards “liberal” NPR? To use a favorite quote from Elaine May, “Information cannot argue with a closed mind.” The people who didn’t like NPR yesterday won’t like it any better post-Vivian Schiller. She didn’t create the aura of NPR as an ideological counterweight to Fox — although she did emphasize it as an intellectual counterweight to shallow coverage by any news organization — and those who see it as diametrically opposed to conservatives won’t change their minds because she’s gone.

But if Edwards and the NPR board aren’t careful, her departure could well derail many of the efforts either started or championed by Vivian Schiller — multi-platform growth and access, NPR-supported increased local, state and regional coverage, international coverage, the emphasis on multiple revenue streams, and more. NPR made some great strides over the past two years; its future shouldn’t be hobbled by missteps.

Disclosure: Over years of coverage during her tenure at the NYT and then at NPR, I’ve grown to know and like Vivian Schiller. I’ve also covered NPR for years, been a listener for longer and occasionally appear on shows that it syndicates. Personally, I wish this had turned out differently for all.