Earlier today, we announced the first two keynotes for our 6th annual Business Information & Media Summit (BIMS) at the Margaritaville Resort in Hollywood, Fla.—yes, Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville—taking place Nov. 11-13. Both will be giving talks directly related to the SIPA audience.

“We invest almost all the money back into our business.” That’s a line that trade reporters often hear, typically with a great deal of skepticism. When it is true, it typically means a certain group or technology within the organization is receiving the lion’s share of that investment (as a cub reporter I remember hearing a CEO give our B2B division a motivational speech that boiled down to pointing to the then red hot yet soon-to-crash consumer apartment guides and saying, “Be more like them”).  

After only six years,Industry Dive just went over the 1,000,000 subscriber mark for its 10-plus verticals. They rely on an advertising-based revenue model—they told The Washington Post last year that they charge $60 for every 1,000 impressions.

At our BIMS conference last month, Elizabeth Green, CEO of Brief Media—a leading publisher in the veterinary medicine field—delivered a keynote titled Disrupting Goliath: Tales of a Small Cap Media Innovator. "I've spent my entire tenure as a publisher watching Goliath," she said. What she learned helped her to build one of the top brands in the field.

“My job is making sure the customer is at the heart of everything we’re doing across all our initiatives,” Robyn Duda, VP of brand strategy & experience design for event-giant UBM, told us Monday on Day 1 of SIIA’s Business Information & Media Summit (BIMS) here in warm and friendly Fort Lauderdale, where winds of change swirled outside and in. That means focusing on instant gratification, Duda said. “It’s the biggest disruptor we have in business now, especially in B2B.” After describing her own such coming-out party with House of Cards—“The next one starts automatically in 20 seconds! I watched every episode in a week.”—Duda said, “that’s the expectation of society now. ‘I want it now. I can do it now. I can watch it now. I can eat it now.’ That has been B2C but it has transformed to the B2B side too now.” In this cruise-ship driven locale, a few themes clearly floated to ...