MediaSavvy

I love Netflix. I’ve been using it less than a month and I don’t think I’ll ever set foot in a video store again. Netflix is so good at what it does that it is able to overcome the lousiness of its Web site.

It’s a better way to rent movies. You tell them what movies you want to see. For $20 a month, you can have three movies checked out at any time, and they send you new DVD’s as you return the ones you’re viewing.

This has a lot of advantages, starting with the elimination of multi-day rental charges and late fees. Then there’s elimination of trips to the video store to rent and return DVD’s. Finally it helps me avoid seizing up when I can’t find the one or two movies I came to the store to rent. Oh, and it helps to have more information about the film than the blurbs on the box.

Their operations are brilliant. Their custom mailer doubles as a paid return envelope. They email you when they receive your returns and when they ship a DVD to you, so you know what’s coming. The whole thing is designed to be fast and inexpensive.

But their web site is awful. I’ve rated 40 films on the site, but Netflix’s Recommendations link returns an empty page. You can’t search for films by director. Their “Critics’ Picks” are awkward to browse. Their links to related films are unimaginative. The cumulative effect is that it’s really difficult to find films to add to your rental queue.

This is surprising because this is not a difficult design problem and it has been solved at least twice. I have no idea why Netflix hasn’t learned from IMDB or reel.com how to design a movie Web site.

I don’t doubt that a better site would improve their bottom line, but Netflix’s grassroot success is a lesson for us all. Even when the Web is your only presence in the market, getting the operations right is absolutely critical.

There isn’t an online publishing business model, says Vin Crosbie, there are manyonline publishing business models.

That’s absolutely correct. I’d go a step further and say there isn’t a single print business model, either. Vin seems to be saying that business publications can charge for subscriptions, and that consumer books cannot (or not very much, anyway).

However, there are plenty of great business publications who give away subscriptions to either 100% of their readers in order to have maximum coverage of a desirable market (CIO magazine), or give away a certain percentage of subscriptions to very important readers (like CEO’s) and sell themselves dear to lesser mortals (Forbes).

There are also plenty of consumer magazines who either charge close to full price for subscriptions (The New Yorker sometimes) or rely primarily on undiscounted newsstand sales (People).

In other words, there isn’t a single online publishing business model because there isn’t a single print publishing business model.

A couple of recent articles made me realize the importance of being good enough, but no better.

David Weinberger has a great note on the battle between those who want to make the underlying structure of the web more…structured, and those who see the advantage of the current markup mess.

Dave points out that it is precisely that inattention to well-formed and formal syntax that made the Web a runaway hit with people who were more interested in publishing than in coding. In the very early days of the Web, SGML veterans detested the sloppy HTML we were all writing. The early versions of Netscape were notoriously forgiving of bad HTML and we all benefited:

I mean, if the early browsers only read well-formed and valid HTML, the Web would be far neater, one-thousandth the size, and lifeless.

Meanwhile, Clay Shirky has yet another excellent essay, this time on the tension between “the [vision of the Net] everyone wants — ubiquitous and convenient — and the … the one we get — spotty and cobbled together.”

Clay’s point is that cheap and adequate networks nearly always offer better price/performance than expensive, optimized networks. And these networks can be incrementally optimized over time at a much lower, widely-distributed cost (and faster revenue ramp) than building the perfect network from scratch.

These “nearlynets” have the advantage that they are much less subject to abuse because they’re not owned by a single, inevitably large, investor/builder.

Mobile companies’ need for increased average revenue per user (ARPU) is likely to retard adoption of 3G technology, according to a new report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Microsoft.

Of course, the drive to increase ARPU is driven by carriers’ post-bubble balance sheets and not by the unproven value of 3G for consumers.

PWC and MS say that consumers in Britain are already concerned about the high cost of mobile calls, and the carriers’ pricing plans will double the cost for those who make the move to 3G. And that doesn’t include the GBP400 for the phones themselves.

This is the latest in the continuing struggle of mobile network operators’ to duplicate (and exploit) the growth of the Internet while eliminating the openness, choice, end-to-end philosophy, and low cost that made the Internet successful.