Earth: Mostly Harmless

What’s wrong with today’s web media

December 6, 2006 on 4:21 pm |
Categories: economics, journalism, technology
Tags: advertising, economics, google, informit, journalism, layout, technology, the-long-tail

Have a look at this article at InformIT. Useful, well-written content - but it’s laid out so badly that you’re put off reading the whole thing by the ad-ridden multi-page badness that is their site design.

On the linked article’s page, you have to look past a network banner; a full-size ad banner; a header/login bar; a set of navigation ‘tabs’; a bread-crumb trail; a title; a set of descriptive metadata to do with the article; a toolbar (save/discuss/print/email); and a table of contents box before you get to the actual content. That’s 750 vertical pixels of page to look past - in other words, an entire screenful on a 1024×768 screen. I have a 1680×1050 screen on my iMac, and I can still only see the first six lines of the story in my RSS reader.

The article is spread over ten pages. Why? It’s only two thousand words long. This is something I see a lot on technology sites, Tom’s Hardware being the worst offender (example). To make matters worse, the table of content box (pictured left) is right where the actual content should be. It’s got a stupid AJAX collapsable header - the need for which just exposes the fact that it gets in the way. Personally, unless the story was extremely important to me I wouldn’t tend to read more than a couple of ‘pages’ from an article like this - clicking through just gets tiresome.

[Note: I'm about to put in a 'more' tag, which means you'll have to click through to read the rest of this story. This may seem hypocritical, but remember that you'll only have to click-through if you're on the home page of this blog, where it exists for brevity of the blog entry list. On the permalink page, which corresponds to something like InformIT's article page, the entire blog entry is displayed.]

The space at the right of the story is also filled with ads and useless guff: for example this ’search related books’ box. If the books it searched were truly contextual (that is, directly related to this article) then I could see some value in it. But it isn’t - it’s just a general search box for Safari Books. So what’s the point of this for me? How is this search ‘related’ to the content I’m interested in?

And now the killer. Revisit the page, and click the ‘print’ button in the toolbar below the article title. Now you’re presented with an ad-free, single page version of the story. In this version, none of the problems outlined are evident. The thing is,most people who browse news sites know that this scam goes on - so whenever they are presented with an ad-ridden page, they either set their browser ad-blockers to ’stun’ or hit the link for the printable version straight away.

Clearly this is non-optimal, and is motivated by the misguided assumption that cramming all the advertising you possibly can onto a page will increase your revenues. It certainly will increase your per-reader revenues. But your number of readers will go down after you piss them off with so many ads and such bad design.

Therein lies the fallacy: by attempting to bolster ad dollars, InformIT have actually reduced them. In economics, this is called the law of unintended consequences. InformIT, judging by this page, can only see “eyeballs” - forgetting that the value of advertising reduces as people are deluged by it in a place they do not expect to find it.

It’s a classic Long Tail proposition, and this sort of thing goes on in other areas too. For example, when visiting the cinema, how many minutes of adverts do you watch on average before a big Hollywood movie? How overpriced are the popcorn and drinks? By pushing patron capitalisation too far in this way, cinemas have felt the wrath of consumer choice through increased home rentals relative to cinema patronage. The negative experience of visiting the cinema now almost overshadows the entertainment benefit of viewing the film.

In the same way, sites like InformIT are discouraging continued visits. On the Internet, you cannot afford to do this. There is zero cost to switching to some other information provider, and innumerable alternatives exist for most of the articles out there. Given that creating genuinely unique content is quite difficult, sites like this may want to consider what they’re asking their existing ‘customers’ to put up with. If they presented a slimmed-down single-page version, people might actually read to the end of the story (and see the side-ads at the same time), and their exit rate wouldn’t be so high.