The following was an e-mail forwarded without additional citation information sometime in Sept. 2001. It provides a great deal of ‘insider’ information about the newest BOL. It also provides a fascinating commentary on the struggle of a reference product to make the transition successfully from print to online. –jn-
________________________________
Patty Ginness from BOL Senior VP of Sales & Marketing (And a Very Brave Woman)
EB was founded
1768 in
o 1994- EB launches BOL, the first Internet encyclopedia
o 1996 - Jacob Safra purchased EB
from the
o 1996 - 2001 BOL develops internet strategy o Several founds of re-structuring o Complete revision of database o Continues to develop some proprietary technologies Developing the Strategy, Restructuring:
o By 1999, more than 70% of all fulltime 4-year college students in US had paid access to BOL; also 1300 public libraries, 7,000 K-12 schools
o In
Fall 1999 - EB offers encyclopedia free of charge, supported by advertising and
e-commerce; many paid subscribers drop out
o By Mid-2000: sites across the web fail
o Late 2000 -
o Early 2001 Ilan Yeshua, CEO of CETH, is appointed CEO of Britannica School and ultimately Encyclopedia Britannica and Britannica.com, Inc.
o
Britannica companies refocus on their core strengths of reference and learning
across all delivery methods: online, CD, print (print products are back)
o
Intend next to print Encyclopedia Britannica in 2002
o
September 2001 - BOL will no longer be available for free online
o Planning some "vertical products" such as Encyclopedia of the Nobel Prize; Encyclopedia of the Presidents, and so on.
o Will be at
o New
subscription service will be geared toward the needs of serious educational
users, particularly at the higher-ed institutional level; will include the most
useful features of EBOL and more
o Britannica.com and BritannicaSchool will be ad-free and subscription-based.
**REPEAT: In September EB will re-launch BOL as a reference-oriented web site targeted to educational institutions
** What will be included in this educational version?
o Entire encyclopaedia, with 80,000 articles o Merriam-Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus
o EB Intermediate, with 36,000 articles
o Premium magazine, journal, and video selection Selected titles from EBSCO full text
o Britannica Concise Encyclopedia (based on 1-volume printed Merriam-Webster Collegiate Encyclopedia)
o Britannica Internet Guide (over 300,000 sites selected by editors)
o Subscribing colleges and universities will be offered free
access to
What Will be Free: o Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
o Internet Guide o Selected articles and features, including some magazine and journal articles, etc.
o Merriam-Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus
What is in the Core EB database?
o 80,000 articles, updated and revised monthly
o TOC, index listings, and more than 1 million internally-linked cross references
o More than 17,000 illustrations, including photos, multimedia, tables, graphs, maps, charts
What's EB intermediate?
o
Formerly
o 25,00 articles, 6,000+ media elements o
What Features?
o Newly designed homepage o Smart, efficient, easy interface
o Dropdown box for search parameters
o A What's New area
o Britannica premium services (validated by IP) will be ad-free
o Highlights study tools
o News headlines
o Search box on every page… search all or select
o Can print search results
o Will have browsing Alpha browse World Browse Topical browse Newly designed article pages
o Z39.60 compliant
o Support for handicapped access standards
o Browser control (font size, etc)
o Text only version
o All of the most popular existing Britannica online features
Pricing Scale, by FTE, from:
o 300 or fewer $495 ALL THE WAY TO
o 1 million $202,995 plus $.30 per user over 500,000
o Weighting available for FTE in schools, community colleges, public libraries, etc.
o At the lowest end, those prices went up a little; are not going as high on consortium numbers.
*******
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Q. What is your anticipated business plan, projections? How will you be getting business back.
A. We would like to restore 50% of our overall business across the former institutional market this calendar year; 80% at end of second year. We now have 25% of that 1999 market we had.
Q. We were told in January 2000 that BOL was losing money on the business it then had.
A. Now we are not thinking just as an Internet company. We have reduced staffing in the online companies to 120 people now (used to have 450 in 1999). Costs have, therefore, gone down significantly. We are looking at additional revenue sources. E-commerce and advertising bring in $5 million per year.
Q. Where are those 120 staff?
A. That's just Britannica.com, not Britannica Inc. We used to have a lot of editorial people working on the free site, doing music, art, entertainment, sports, up to 16 channels. Our editorial team remains intact. Our technology staffing is significant. We have 9 people in sales, only. Looking to increase that.
Q. How much flexibility do you have to adjust these consortial prices to bring people back? Folks have moved their dollars elsewhere.
A. We have just a little bit of flexibility. We don't want to go back to being $.20 per student or we will go back to where we were before financially.
Q. With all these staff cuts, is the quality still as high as it was before?
A. Primarily, the staff cuts were taken in the for-free site (writing articles like "Looking at Britney Spears navel"), and not people doing editorial work. That side had a very large staff.
Q. What kind of assurances do we have that you did the math right? Can you commit to a multi-year contract with frozen pricing?
A. We could commit to that to lock in a price.
Q. This offer
is aimed at the
A. We cannot collect monthly payments.
Q. We're looking for long-term guarantees; we got stung with lots of work last time. We need a new process and a new way in which to work with you.
A. What do other vendors provide? Discuss some of your contracts with us and let's see what we can do.
Q. Will you have a European office? EB seems very US centric.
A. We use the
British spellings! We have a
Q. What is an
FTE user? We use an "annual average" FTE in
A. An FTE is a full time equivalent student. We don't count staff, etc.
Q. Are your nine sales people in the field or in-house? Will you hire sales folks for the institutional side? Can you drop the institutional sales staff and put the money toward a reduced price?
A. The sales
staff are on the in-house side. Field staff will be
re-tasked to
Q. What will Britannica do to maintain openness about what is going on?
A. I was initially in product development, then VP for e-commerce. We want to continue advisory panels as they had existed in the past.
Q. Why is there no advertising on the subscription site?
A. Because you don't want it there! We collect $4,000-$6,000 for page views --- that's the going rate on the Internet.
Q. You will print books again. This seems counter-intuitive. Encyclopedias are expensive to print. Is printing cheaper now?
A. Our last print products were in 1998. We created 27,000 print sets. 2,000 are left. The sales of print are declining in this country, but that is not true globally.
Q. Which other format of EB will you sell?
A. CD-ROM products. AOL bought 5,000 of those CDs, as a wholesale customer.
Q. For the public libraries is there remote access?
A. There is remote access, with a slight upcharge, as before.
Q. Compare EB's online, CD, and print versions.
A. The CD is a snapshot of the database in time; as print is a snapshot in time. All work off same SGML database, now moving to XML.
Q. Is there any financial incentive for buying online and print as well?
A. Yes, online saves $300 on print. The new print edition costs $1295; for an e-subscriber, it costs $995.
Q. What's your date for the subscription site to go live?
A. We'll be lucky to get this out by mid-August, so there are no previews of new site, interface; sorry!
Q. Your sales goal is to double current educational sales in first year. People will have trouble with that. What if next year at this time you only increased by, say 35%?
A. We have some room. If we don't hit our target, we won't shut down. Q. Is there no room in pricing for larger scale deal? A. No; we have made a conscious choice here. ---
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