Category: General

Cleaning up the clutter

Ad clutter reduces as inventories flatten — a return to the NASCARization of web pages?

A welcome trend in online advertising is the reduction in the number of ad units per page … welcome to users that is who have conditioned themselves to skip over anything that flashes, dances, or interferes with the content of a page. It’s also a welcome trend for page designers, who can spend months on an elegant page template and palette only to see it trashed by a proliferation of ad units.

 The bad news for publishers and advertisers is the reduction in clutter also means a squeeze on inventories. The 90s saw sites such as Forbes.com get "NASCARed" (to use our term at the time) with dozens of micro buttons that permitted publishers to report up to as many as a dozen "impressions" per page. Since traffic was measured with a dull axe in those days, and because advertisers and their agencies weren’t really measuring performance to any exact degree, people could get away with claiming "billions and billions served." Remember, these were the days when an online publishing executive could stand up and claim that "hits" were a relevant measurement, and when no self-respecting online publisher would admit to anything less than millions and millions of those hits, ignoring the reality that a hit counted every image, every server-side include, and parsed a site into its content components.

The standardization of units by the Internet Advertising Bureau saw a reduction in clutter-ads and a big transition towards bigger, but fewer units such as the skyscraper (which we invented at Forbes), leader boards, big boxes, and other more substantive units.

Bigger is certainly better for all parties, but has lead to the challenge du jour for online publishers — inventory expansion. Want insight into the M&A flurry over the past six months? A rationale for the Times buying About? WSJ.com buying Marketwatch? It all comes down to page views. With internet usage beginning to plateau, publishers have to find the page views somewhere — and syndication, RSS, link sharing and other traffic swaps are only going to carry them so far.

 Last week Doubleclick published a ten-year history of online advertising by its Director of Research, Rick Bruner. He writes:

"… the growth in the number of unique visitors and page views has slowed to an almost negligible rate compared to years earlier. Among the 20 sites with the most display ad impressions, the total number of page views was up only 5% from Q4 2003 to Q4 2004, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. At the same time, the number of display ad impressions in the last year among major U.S. sites is down (5% down for the top 1,200 ad-supported sites; 13% down for the top 20 ad-supported sites). Part of that decline in overall display ad impressions among the largest sites is due in large part to a reduction of clutter, as sites increasingly feature fewer smaller ad units (such as buttons and half banners)

and standardize on the new larger ad sizes promoted in recent years by the IAB (especially extra-large banner “leader boards,” wide skyscrapers and medium and large rectangles)."

 As publishers try to drive traffic to a flattening audience (traffic growth is not infinite), clutter may return. Dave Morgan at Tacoda writes on Click-Z:

"What do we think will happen as increasingly more ad money chases scarcer, slower-growing Web page audiences? Most online ad buyers I informally polled over the past few weeks gave me the same answer: Web pages will become increasingly crowded, expensive, and less desirable."

 Bruner disagrees, saying in his retrospective that the de-clutter movement will continue:

"Premium media brands are likely to attempt to further reduce ad clutter to avoid the risk of turning off their audiences. Publishers that depict the sponsorship value of advertising more transparently to consumers and at the same time reduce interruption-overload will benefit from more loyal audiences

and higher ad prices."

 Something has to give or something needs to be invented. As targeted advertising meets CPC models, insertion technology has to evolve to truly offer contextual advertising, drawing from a pool of ads and placing them in the right place at the right time. The old model of registering one’s traffic to do crude IP look-up serving based on geography has to move much further into clickstream analysis, parsing, on the fly, the session’s attributes and attempting, in real-time to shift the served inventory towards the bias of the user. Falling back to the old NASCAR model of splattering a page with a higher number of units will drive users away.

Traffic development, syndication (The NYT reported huge increases in traffic thanks to its RSS feeds), and better insertion and targeting are the way to fix the dilemma. Publishers need to jack their CPMs to reflect the growing value of their limited inventories, building a performance case to sponsors and advertisers and not falling over themselves to kneel before the altar of Big Numbers. 

I have a new gig

Last week I accepted an offer to become the VP/GM of Online for CXO Media, publishers of CIO, CSO, CMO magazines. I’ll be leading the development and strategy for four sites. CXO is part of IDG, the global tech publishing giant founded by Patrick McGovern in the early-sixties and is one of the most aggressive "traditional" publishers when it comes to online publishing.

This is going to be a great gig. IDG’s online groups are some of the best in the business and include PC World, InfoWorld, ComputerWorld and NetworkWorld.

Is nothing sacred?

While looking at the infographic in the NYT this morning that details the papal voting process, I saw, tucked under the drawing of the Sistine Chapel, the words "Cellphone Scrambler."

First, I want a cell phone scrambler to carry on my person to block anyone, including myself, in the general vicinity from receiving or placing phone calls. Sort of a personal "cone of silence."

But sticking one in the Sistine Chapel leads to all sorts of questions. Is it to keep the Cardinals from receiving calls in the middle of the balloting? Or is it to keep them from placing calls to the outside world, tipping off the media that a two-thirds majority has been achieved and so beating the white smoke out of the chimney?

 

Atlantic Monthly to Leave Boston

Another nail in the coffin for Boston publishing but understandable given the magazine’s sad finances. As one of its 350,000 subscribers, I certainly hope and pray the Atlantic will survive in Washington, but I rue the state of New England magazine publishing.

DVD profit margins double that of VHS

DVD profit margins double that of VHS

Someone at MGM parked the wrong Powerpoints on the server. Fascinating insights into DVD economics, margins, and corporate intelligence by Ken Fisher at ArsTechnica. Thanks to Ben Lipman for the pointer. 

When will Web 2.0 Hit Communities?

Remember “communities?”

About the same time the portal model was all the rage – following the twilight of “push” – was an obsession with online community building. Having tried, and failed, to launch a company based on niche communities, but having put in a full decade of community development with Reel-Time, I wonder where the passion has gone.

If one accepts the definition of Web 2.0 as one of personal syndication and aggregation – using feeds to construct connections and building one’s own network of content and contacts – then where is the model for communities?

 

Communities are defined by their technology – for the most part threaded discussions built on top of PHP systems such as vBulletin and UltimateBB. The community developer creates a taxonomy of subjects and the users register and post in a thread, response structure. Moderators keep the flamers and spammers at bay, power users are promoted to exalted status where they can also moderate, and the page views begin to flow. Push and notification can occur in most systems via email notification, but for the most part, in my experience, that facility is ignored. Private message systems within the walls of the community are available, and used, again to a limited extent. Anonymity is permitted to the degree that users can post under a handle (with authentication of their identity usually occurring via emailed passwords and IP lookup) and the registered member-to-lurker ratio generally remains at 1 to 4.

Real-time interaction via chat is limited and doesn’t seem to hold much potential as communities work best when they time-shift. A quick ping and instant message – such as that permitted on the WELL of old – is convenient but not necessary.

Blogs have exploded the central model of a hosted community by spinning off the more prolific posters into their own domain, with the host moderating comments and constraining the give and take. A blog visitor cannot – usually – post their own comment, but must wait for approval before their remarks can be footnoted to the blogger’s main post. Blogs are very “egotistical” communities at best. The Blogger dominates, the audience is comprised of spectators raising their hands in the audience. Reel-Time has initiated a community of blogs, extending WordPress installations to a few beta testers. Mark Cahill, our editor, has built a central facility to aggregate recent postings and present them on R-T’s homepage, obviating the need for an RSS newsreader.

As we roll out the network of blogs a few concerns arise – one is the potential damage it will do to the traditional vBulletin system, which is very robust with over 8,000 registered users and as many as 800 concurrent registered users and lurkers. Our fear is that by opening a second medium for the “better” posters and giving them their own space to play with, we’ll remove the most valuable asset of the general community. Making them coexist will be a challenge.

One path we may follow is to restrict the granting of blogs (we’re calling them Flogs – for “Fishing Logs, R-T is about saltwater fly fishing) to “celebrity” bloggers – authors and experts within the niche who can bring some pre-existing credibility and gravitas to their writing. Other issues — such as moderating the blogs should someone decide to do something truly heinous — is a concern that will raise its head over time. We have developed a terms of service agreement that tries to distance ourselves from the Blogger content – we don’t want to be held liable for any libel – and which gives us the right to shut them off if we so please.

As we try to create a meta-community around the concept of blogs linked by a common passion, I can’t help but feel we’re missing something, that the fluidity of the conversation we’ve seen over the last decade in the traditional community will be lost as it fragments into islands of ego.

FT.com adding a whopping 443 paid subscribers per month

PaidContent.org "And a factoid on FT.com: The Financial Times has 76,000 subscribers to its site, and that total is growing at roughly a 7 percent annual rate, according to the company."

Wow. All of 443 new paid users per month? Why bother? No wonder the FT is consigned to the giveaway bin at the Delta Shuttle.  

IGN being shopped for $600-$800mm

IGN – host of the vgame sites Gamespy, IGN and TeamXbox is being shopped by Shearson-Lehmann for $600 to $800 according to the WSJ.

5.3 million monthly uniques to Gamespy in a market where the $9.9 bn annual spend beats the movies. The Journal only cites Gamespy’s traffic, which would value the deal at $133 per unique. This continues to be the season of Internet Search and Content M&A.

 

Digressionary Print Formats

The cover story of the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly is by David Foster Wallace on the subject of talk radio. I enjoyed the piece, and as always Wallace’s great writing but I’d like to draw attention to the design of the article, specfically the use of sidenotes to accomodate and encourage Wallace’s penchant for digressions, footnote, and asides.

The best way to understand the design of the piece is to buy a copy of the magazine. A PDF is available online to subscribers, but the online version has some elements that try, but don’t truly express the concept.

"[Editor’s Note: In the print version of this article additional commentary from the author appears alongside the main text. (Subscribers may scroll down this page for a link to an Adobe PDF version of the article.) In the version below, click the phrases within the colored boxes to read the commentary.]"

 

The text of the article is occasionally highlighted in colors — think of the highlighter function in Microsoft Word — which signifies that the reader should look to the side of the main text for the appropriately colored box which contains a side note. Each color denotes a different type of sidenote. A footnote may be yellow, an editorial note blue, etc.

Wallace is a master of digression, a writer similar to Thomas Pynchon in his love with spiralling detours down the path of minutia, paths which can either lead the reader to despair of ever picking up the main narrative, or delight them if their taste in detail and complexity follow the author’s. In Infinite Jest, Wallace’s sprawling novel about tennis and Alcoholics Anonymous, he resorts to footnotes, a serious irritation to a reader who must flip to the end-notes to follow along. Thankfully, Wallace just keeps advancing the footnote counter through the entire novel, rather than following the academic practice of resetting the counter every chapter which forces the reader to seek the chapter’s section of footnotes, and then to that chapter’s specific note.

The practice of running footnotes right at the foot of the main text is more convenient, but nevertheless forces the reader to drop the narrative, move to the tiny type, and then return to where they left off.

What the Atlantic Monthly accomplishes is a very elegant solution to page design — one of the more innovative advances in print I’ve seen in some time and the best solution for hypertext concepts I have seen in print.  The "ergonomics" work well, the notes are easier to access due to their formatting adjacent to the main point, and there are no tiny superscript numbers cluttering the text. The colored highlights break the text snake of the mainbar like highway signs, making departure and return simple.

There are a lot of solutions to the problem of accomodating digressionary content. Hover balloons, IntelliText advertising, or good old fashioned hyperlinks can all accomplish the job online. The Atlantic has presented a print solution which could, if adapted, be a very elegant model for online design.