F+W Media has leveraged the power of the community – or communities in its case – to carve out a high-growth e-commerce business. Its 21 e-stores – selling everything from books, CDs and DVDs to workshops, calendars and, increasingly, affiliate products – helped the publisher grow its e-commerce revenues by 113% in 2009. 

"Media has become a platform of services," said David Liu, CEO of The Knot, during day one of Federation of International Periodical Publishers (FIPP) Digital Innovators Summit yesterday. During a session named, "Digital revenues: beyond the banner," Liu laid out how The Knot transformed itself from a handful of websites relying on national display advertisers for well over 50 percent of its revenues in the early 2000's to a network of over 280 sites with less than 20% reliance on display today.

Audiences want to interact with media brands on mobile devices—via “untethered digital content”  said John Loughlin, Hearst Magazines EVP and general manager, at the recent Digital Innovators' Summit in Berlin.

 The Columbia Journalism Review just released a report called "Magazines and Their Web Sites".  It's possible to draw a conclusion from the findings that magazine websites are more likely to be profitable if they put "web guys" in charge and don't worry much about things like copy editing or fact checking.  Well, you might think that if you confused correlation with causality.

Angel investor and serial entrepreneur David S. Rose asked the startups of the Incubator at Rose Tech Ventures, "Who owns a customer in today's world of Twitter, iTunes, Facebook and Google?" The debate that followed focused on the rise of APIs and marketplaces and their impact on business transactions. The conclusion? We are heading towards a world where no one owns a customer.