Jupiter says, “Fewer than 20 percent of most sites’ audience will customize, and only five percent will increase usage frequency because of it.” There’s not a lot more information available without buying the report.
This isn’t surprising, but it’s certainly reason for caution and parsimony when implementing customization.
More evidence that consumers multi-task media
Another researcher is investigating consumers’ simultaneous use of multiple media. As I said earlier, this multi-tasking almost certainly favors the Net.
Try it and see. I think you’ll find that if you’re really reading and thinking, you won’t have any idea what’s happening in your local soundscape. Certainly not well enough to follow a narrative or ad message.
Yahoo's hitting on all cylinders, including ads
According to the WSJ, Yahoo’s revenue is up 50% to $248.8 million from $166.1 million a year earlier, and “marketing-services revenue climbed 22% to $147.4 million, which the company attributed to the company’s sponsored search services and inside sales organization.”
So, although services revenue continues to rise, marketing revenue accounted for more than a third the increase in revenue ($32 million out of $83 million), and may well be an even bigger share of Yahoo’s profit boost.
MSNBC saw Yahoo’s success as a reason for optimism about the online ad market, even before it became clear that Yahoo was well ahead of analyst’s estimates.
The future is poor-media advertising
I’ve been engaged in an interesting discussion on the Online News mailing list about the power of text advertising. A couple of participants say their experience shows that text ads outdraw graphics. I’m not surprised. No one goes online to read GIF’s.
Text advertising is desirable because it’s reader-friendly, cheap to produce, and more effective.
But, general advertisers and their agencies don’t understand text advertising for business and cultural reasons. They don’t make any money on production. The best-paid and most prestigious people at the agency are doing TV work. And everything is geared toward creating and maintaining “brands”, not selling stuff.
This is consistent with research that shows that “traditional” advertisers are embracing “rich media advertising”.
Then that leaves direct marketers, whom I have always seen as the natural market for online advertising. My sense is that they’re obsessed with direct email right now. Direct email is problematic because good lists are hard to find and expensive, and spam has increased consumer resistance and honed email filtering.
The next steps are becoming clear:
1. Develop standardized text-ad formats
2. Improve the marketing of Web advertising, particularly text, to direct marketers and their agencies.
3. Invent ways to make general news and information pages attractive to direct marketers without violating readers’ privacy or even appearing to do so.
Goodbye: Arts & Letters Daily
I was saddened to learn of the death of Arts & Letters Daily. This remarkable site was a brilliant example of the power of really simple web page design, and a daily reminder of the amount of quality, free information on the Web.
I’m going to leave them on my bookmark list for a while, in their memory. It’s a reminder of just how ephemeral this medium is. You never know when a valuable resource, or a valued friend, will disappear. Cherish, encourage, and protect the part of Web that means the most to you.
UPDATE: Of course, A&L Daily was saved and was never out of business for long.
When blogging is its own reward
Clay Shirky says, “A lot of people in the weblog world are asking “How can we make money doing this?” The answer is that most of us can’t. ”
This essay is definitely worth reading. When blogging is its own reward, supply will exceed demand — by a lot.
Content you can sell
I’m not sure what to make of this interesting collection of information about paid content on eMarketer.
I don’t understand why Forrester’s index is based on the percentage of broadband and wireless users who’ll pay for a type of content, or why they think online tenure (which doesn’t seem to vary much) matters.
One thing is clear, news and general information is not on the list, so it must have a “Propensity to Pay Index” of less than 1.00. Video, consumer information, telephone calls, and music are at leasts 1.23.
Emarketer’s list of subscription sites is very interesting. Genealogy, connections between people (cards, classmates, and dating), and entertaiment dominate the list. The non-entertainment content organizations in the top 25 are Consumers Union, Wall St. Journal, Get Abstract, Sporting News, The Economist, TheStreet.com, Rivals.com, and Hoovers.
Congress fights censorship, promotes irony
Why is it that Congress wants to give the citizens of other countries the technology tools to avoid censorship on the Internet, but insist on censorship in our schools and libraries and government offices. I don’t see how these tools could be really work in, say, China and not in America’s schools.
Wired News missed the deep irony of this story, but CNET got it right away. Wired news used to be the best source on the Net for information on the impact of technology on society and the other way around. Its long decline shows how hard it is for a company like Terry Lycos to manage a news operation well.
Cheap tricks Yahoo News should steal from the NYT
On a Saturday the New York Times technology news page and Yahoo’s technology news page are very similar in content, but could not be more different in design. The differences are telling.
The New York Times tech news page is dominated by wire stories from AP, Reuters, and Bloomberg, with a sprinkling of NYT-generated content. Yahoo’s tech news is, of course, exclusively wire content. Both, as far as I know, are edited by human beings. Each page has about half-a-dozen stories above the fold, in the first screenful of information. The two pages seem to have a lot of the same stories on them.
Why do I like the NYT page so much better?
The NYT page is better-designed. It uses Times (naturally), and Yahoo uses Arial, Microsoft’s ugly, cheapskate Helvetica knockoff.
The Times gives you more information about its top stories. The Times has summaries of the top stories and has headlines-only stories below the fold, but Yahoo has only one summary above the fold, followed headlines, and then most of its summaries below the fold.
The NYT page is denser. I love white space and the Web gives us the chance to create lots of it, but news pages want to be information-rich. Also, Yahoo’s white space seems to be the random space between automatically-generated text fields. Navigation bars should be easy to find, but the least-prominent thing on the page. NYT’s navigation bar is much tighter than Yahoo’s, using condensed roman sans serif (Arial, alas). Yahoo’s nav bar text is wide and bold.
Yahoo has a much more prominent ad on its tech page, but I don’t see that as an issue. The problem is what Yahoo does with the space it has.
It’s hard to tell how much of Yahoo News’s design problems stem from Yahoo’s trademark design. My guess is that they don’t have much control over fonts.
But I would like to higher information density on Yahoo’s news pages, more summaries above the fold, a narrower nav bar. Google’s tech news solves a lot of these problems, but the automated story selection is not nearly as effective as Yahoo’s human editors.
Excellent research on usability
The excellent site on designing for usability could be more usable. It really needs a navigation bar, for example. But it’s really worth keeping handy for when you need research to back up detail of usability. [via PHP Everywhere]