What future for Factiva?

What are we to make of the Factiva deal reached last week between Dow Jones and Reuters? The erstwhile partners in the joint venture are competitors once again – though these Ts&Cs suggest Reuters' hands have been well tied. Reuters must now watch and see what happens with its abandoned offspring, while being highly restricted in how it can compete with Dow Jones as it tries to re-focus Factiva on some more profitable activities.

Let's try to put the deal in context – for a start it gives a public valuation of the business - $320m to be precise, as Dow Jones is paying $160m for a half share. Factiva's operating revenue in 2005 was $281m, with profits in "double-digit figures". That means this valuation is probably a little over what the company's annual earnings are. Is that a great return on seven years of investment and expensive global infrastructure and brand building?

Compare that with what Google just paid for YouTube - $1.65bn. That's five times what Factiva's worth, and the YouTubers hadn't even worked out ways of making money.

Reuters' Tom Glocer, in comments made last week, seems to be well aware that news aggregation is a busted flush in light of the launch of Google News Archive. He seems to be well-pleased that he's washed his hands of Factiva. What does that say about other – possibly dead - ducks in the water like NewsNow, Verisign's Moreover division, or Thomson's confusingly bifurcated Dialog operation?

Dow Jones, meanwhile, seems to be the partner that has seen Factiva's future more clearly. There's no doubt that Factiva has been influenced by Reed Elsevier's LexisNexis Butterworth operation, which has been cleverly tacking with the winds in a squally, changeable market. LNB has been working on Client Development applications, which help big professional organisations with embedded sales and marketing services – and note the emphasis here is not on information professionals at all, but on reaching a different set of people in a corporation.

Similarly, Thomson One has been making headway by embedding financial information services into workflow applications on City desks – "whatever that job may be". Factiva knows where the money is – in workflow integration and among finance professional users. Whether Dow Jones wants to keep it running as a separate operation, or use its undoubted internet expertise to beef up Dow Jones services, is an altogether different question. Certainly the Dow Jones name has serious cache. My view is that Factiva as a brand may be going the way of Reuters Business Briefing. Into history.