Media in Transition Conference 2007 / The rise of Social Media and Online Advertising

On September 12th- 13th the international „Media in Transition Conference 2007“ opens its doors. The focus of the conference is the structural transition in the media industry. Innovative media companies, researchers and strategists from UK, USA and Europe are discussing the present and future of Internet media at the Goethe Forum in Munich.

The invited speakers are among others - Martin Stiksel (Last.fm), John Buckman (Magnatune), Simon Willison (Django, ex-Yahoo!, ), Matthew Gertner (AllPeers), Les Ottolenghi (Intent Media), Annet Aris (INSEAD, McKinsey), Alexander Wolf (CEO/ Legal Adviser GEMA)

The Media in Transition Conference has a focus on how mass amateur hordes of people, engaging in sharing of video, photo, blog, chat, geo information etc., are ultimately changing the way media is created, distributed and consumed. Today the informed media consumer spends less and less time with traditional media formats, counting magazines, books and newspapers. The Internet is capturing market share. Blogs, and internet-zines offer more timely and targeted information straight from the source: from the original inventor, engineer, filmmaker, photographer. Gossip and novelty are better served by one of the social media services, such as MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, or even Digg, than reading People or Cosmo magazine.

The main question is: if the public is moving towards Internet driven media consumption, can traditional media companies retain the advertising dollars being spent? Advertising money is the foundation of the media business in diverse sectors ranging from newspapers, zines and TV and radio stations. Can traditional media companies compete in this arena against the Internet behemoths, e.g. Google, Yahoo! or Amazon? Current media analysts peg the size of the Online advertising market at an estimated 5% of the overall ad market. Considering the time consumers spend Online, compared with other media usage, this figure should be more in the realm of 50% or more, and we see this happening within the next ten years.

The next big topic is certainly "Social Media", following the overall Web 2.0 trend. We have seen a flurry of activity in 2006 with companies catering to the social media phenomenon and submitting their site to Michael Arrington's TechCrunch, in hope of becoming the next Youtube or Facebook. So called "user-generated content" is flooding the web and capturing the global audience. David Sifry, CEO of Technorati - the blog search engine, recently in April 2007 released a report called "the State of the Live Web", characterizing the social media revolution as something "alive", where users have the freedom to participate and contribute.

The Media in Transition Conference has invited speakers from diverse backgrounds, providing insight on how the social media revolution is currently being built. Martin Stiksel, founder of the social media platform “Last.fm”, the world's largest in the domain of music, will be speaking about the power of recommendations and data mining with user preferences. John Buckman, serial entrepreneur and Creative Commons, will be speaking about the digital rights situation in the era of user-generated content. Simon Willison, ex-Yahoo! Developer Network and Django framework founder, will be speaking how OpenID, a new digital identity technology, is changing the game, enabling single sign-on for all Internet services. Matthew Gertner will present his newest creation - “AllPeers”, a Peer-to-Peer application built on the Mozilla browser platform, enabling social media sharing in trusted user networks. Les Ottolenghi, current adviser to the Bush White House administration on Peer-to-Peer Networks, will be providing insight on how to capitalize on Peer-to-Peer Networks, considering that P2P applications (Bittorrent) create as much as two-thirds of world-wide Internet traffic.

The Media in Transition Conference 2007 offers a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art social media innovations, communication and business models, as well as distribution methods used on the Internet today. Under the slogan “from experts for experts“, the conference has a very compact format and further introduces extensive networking possibilities for contacting and partnering. Munich, as Germany's media, technology and financial center, offers all the amenities of a global business meeting place and is experienced at providing for international guests.

Find out more about “Media in Transition 2007” at www.mediaintransition.com

The conference cost for both days is 890, - Euro. Daily tickets are sold for under 450, - Euro.

Early bird registration which includes 15% off list price is now open.

Media in Transition is an organisation with the focus on gathering the world´s most innovative speakers in the field of online media.

Media partners:
internet World Business
One to One
I- business

Oezlem Guenay
Karlstrasse 54
80333 Munich
oezlem@mediaintransition.com

This release was published on openPR.