Fun dog photos on the homepage aside, it seems the site is plagued by timeout errors, vanishing wedding/baby registries and unresponsive customer-service centers. (I haven’t seen this myself, but then I’m not a big target.com customer in the first place: For the types of things I buy online, I usually just go straight to their ex-e-commerce partner.) This is sort of like the fresh coat of paint on a dilapidated house, only in this instance the house is brand-new construction where the owner hired 20 contractors and expected them to coordinate. That number might, just might, be the source of these issues.
If anything, this is an important reminder that the underlying technology has always got to be solid and the first consideration — great design is everything, but you need Atlas holding everything up. It’s therefore important to pick a firm that can coordinate both technology and design. I’m searching around for ideas on this one.
I will see Jack and raise him a note of optimism, because despite being one of the cheapest digital bastards around — and I work each day strategizing how to turn people into the opposite of me, which would make me my own toughest target — I plan to drop some cash on the Times this time around.
The arguments against the paywall all make sense:
People will steal the article content and post it elsewhere! True!
People will delete their NYT cookies and use other tech workarounds to get more than 20 articles for free! Absolutely!
The pricing is horrible and confusing! Word!
Potential readers will hit the paywall and bail to free news sources! Many of them will!
But there are several factors that work in favor of the Times with this approach, unlike their previous TimesSelect fail:
It’s not just opinion like TimesSelect. As the saying goes, opinions are like assholes and all that. There are almost 7 billion people on this Earth who can digest information and come up with something to say about it, so I’m thinking that just about defines the idea of a commodity’s price approaching zero. The Times columnist page is prestigious, but where they really hit their core competency (to use douchey MBA language) is in the ground-level creation of news as the paper of record. (And yes, they’ve had mixed performance in the past decade in living up to that, but the brand is still there.) Everyone can read a Times article and react to it, but it’s damn hard work to go out there and generate that article in the first place, and the NYT is the dream job for those ground-level reporters who are able to do that. Like them or hate them, the NYT is the established brand for news for millions, and unlike a lot of other substitutes, it’s worth $15 per month to me keep reflexively reading the Times.
And to promote the idea of the NYT as a high-quality, go-to island amidst a sea of information, I’ll also take this chance to bash the idea of citizen journalism. I recently partook in an instance of citizen journalism when I listened to an interview with Eric Avery on why he (again) left my favorite band, Jane’s Addiction. (The essence is that Perry Farrell is a self-glorifying dick, so not exactly something out of nowhere.) The interviewer from the forum gets big props for scoring this chat with the guy I consider the driving force of the band, but he put up an unedited video that is 16 segments long. That comes out to almost three hours — I love Jane’s and all, but amateur content producers should understand that editing can be OK!
Demographics. This hasn’t changed since TimesSelect, so perhaps I’m more aware of it because I now fit it better, but the Times‘s readership is high-income, generally more than 25 years old and educated. The huge majority are not music pirates who are going to pull the content and share it illegally under a “screw the man!” posture. The sense of entitlement is dead in most people once they reach 25 — or at least I very much hope that it is.
A lot of digitally savvy folks tend to forget that they’re a tiny minority, and not everyone is like them — I would bet that your average Times reader is a lot more willing to pay $15 per month than to figure out how to alter their privacy settings and eliminate the necessary cookies, particularly once the arms race begins between the Times developers and those very few readers who do pursue workarounds.
Graduated pricing. When someone links to an article behind a paywall and I’m not prepared to hit that paywall, I usually get pissed. But when that happens 20 times in a month and I’m suddenly reminded, “Hey, you know you’ve done this a lot, maybe you might consider an end to your damn freeloading,” I’ll be more likely to pony up. Sure, the pricing is complicated and annoying right now, but the system hasn’t even rolled out yet and so there’s been no chance for course correction. Besides, soaking the best customers works for drug dealers, and plenty of us are information junkies.
Social links are still free. Based on my past digital-news jobs, I’m sure the NYT sees huge traffic spikes whenever it posts a story that gets people talking, and the Times tends to do this more than most. These days, that means Facebook and Twitter posts, and they were smart not to cut off this source of new readers. But if you like the site enough to read it 19 times in a month and still be willing to click for more? I’d wager you could be persuaded to pay.
If you traced my digital news consumption starting in college, it would consist of a small diet of initially web-friendly content producers, then a feast on way too many RSS feeds, then a move back to a focused group of content sites that do the best job of offering up clarity and intelligent insight that I can consistently access. My willingness to pay (hi, Prof. Ahuja!) is not infinite, but for the sites that I use the most, it’s there. I can count the Times among them, and I know there are millions like me, no matter how much tech-elite scoffing goes on.
As a former news guy, I really hope this works — but there’s also hard logic to think it will.
The iPad is a gorgeous appliance and I wouldn’t bet against it, or be without one, in the short term. But content creators ought not to delude themselves about Jobs’ efforts to replace the chaos of the Web with his own velvet prison.
While smart from a marketing and strategy perspective, Apple’s first-to-market launches always lead to a lot of bugs, so I await the list of flaws when people really start to buy this thing. (Yes, I’m still angry about my iPod dying exactly one month after the warranty ran out. And that one wasn’t even a new product.)
I still think products like this or the Kindle need to be physically flexible, i.e. soft instead of rigid, before they’ll really catch on as a commuter / on-the-couch reading device. So it’s unfortunate that this isn’t the salvation of media that so many outlets want it to be, even if it’s cool.
I still would rather have a really solid smartphone than a cool tablet device — Nexus One, please.
While running for the border, time to take a detour:
And the 3-minute version:
The tone of these is really strange — in the 3-minute version, at first Taco Bell seems to be going for a Popeil-esque infomercial parody, but then they bring out Christine the now-hot woman and Ruth Carey the registered dietician (who clearly made a conscious choice to sell her professional soul) and things take a turn for the health-oriented. We end again on an upbeat and optimistic note that leaves our parody question totally unresolved.
Looking at this from the b-school marketing perspective, Taco Bell is clearly trying to horn in on Subway’s fast/healthy territory, which the other fast-food dudes have thus far been unable to do. T Bell can bring the dynamic competitive variable of being hella cheap — nobody sparks the image of cheap food better than the Bell, and that’s an added edge over Subway if both are competing in the space of healthy, quick food. This is also a smart move to expand their gender demographic — when’s the last time you saw a woman in a Taco Bell commercial? Their target market is the classic “dude”: 15-34, with an appreciation for cheap, filling, tasty food in a pinch, healthiness being a more secondary consideration. In a word, me.
But from an ethical advertising perspective, it gets my cringe on. If you come at this like that sad girl and her mom in “Supersize Me” who thought they could only follow Jared’s weight-loss example by buying Subway every day, this grabs you right by the sizable haunches and tells you, “Now you can finally afford to follow the fast-food-only diet and get a hot body like this chick.” Note the huge caveat that Taco Bell themselves provided — results aren’t typical, particularly when you consider that Christine reduced her caloric intake to 1,250 calories per day. That means your entire daily intake is a mere 3.67 fresco chicken burritos. I have a feeling I’m in the minority for grasping the meaning of that 1,250 figure and not merely thinking, “If I eat more fresco burritos, I’ll be totally hot,” but maybe I’m not giving the food-buying public enough credit. (Or am I?)
In the end, I have to appreciate this campaign on its evil-marketing-genius merits. I stopped at Taco Bell on my drive Monday back to campus, and the fresco chicken burrito was indeed quite tasty, so I can’t fault TB there. Despite that, I’ll continue to cheer those well-intentioned squares at Center for Science in the Public Interest in their Sisyphean fight for healthy food, because the sooner we stop providing material for People of Wal-Mart, the better.
Damn, I felt today like I was in the boat scene from The Dark Knight.
Most of you dudes know I split my time these days between school in Ann Arbor and home in Chicago. The best way to get back and forth is Megabus, which I took yet again today.
(For anyone interested, here’s a quick cost-benefit analysis of the transportation links between Ann Arbor and Chicago:
Megabus – Cost averages $25, mostly comfortable, takes 4.5 hours including stop for food — though sadly, only at Hardee’s. Nasty.
Amtrak – Cost is $29 on weekdays but $75 on weekends. Most comfortable option, but delayed so often that it averages six hours per trip.
Driving – Cost depends on MPG (about 3/4 tank when I take the VW) but you can’t really do any work. Takes about four hours, and you then have to find parking.
To finally get to the point of my post, today we hit the food break at the Love’s truck stop — the one with the Hardee’s — at mile marker 110, which not only has just one fast-food option but also plays Fox News in the dining area. (Megabus used to stop at the truck stop in Sawyer, Mich., which has a Popeye’s, BK, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut Express. Now that is a quality junk-food spread. I think Love’s must have started paying them to subject us to Hardee’s.) I ate a Thickburger anyway and we left 30 minutes later.
Next up was the exercise in group morality: The driver came on the intercom about 20 miles past Love’s and announced that a passenger was left behind at the truck stop. Whoops. The driver had made several announcements when we stopped that everyone had to be back on by 3 p.m. EST, but whoever this person was somehow failed to note the time. The driver initially said he was going to turn around despite his anger and pick up the person, which would have resulted in us being about 40-50 minutes late in arriving. A bunch of passengers told the driver to keep going anyway — because hey, screw that anonymous guy — so he then announced he was not turning around.
I and the passengers around me found this a bit heartless — anybody who plans an urgent event based on a bus’s on-time arrival is an idiot — so I went downstairs and told the driver he should go back, and despite us both being pissed at the passenger, I could tell he felt the same way. He went on the intercom one more time and said he was turning around, but then enough people howled in protest that we ended up heading to Ann Arbor as scheduled, leaving the unknown passenger to fend for him/herself until the next Megabus comes through. With that bus not leaving Chicago until 4:45 p.m. CST, that comes out to an almost six-hour wait at the truck stop if there isn’t some other ride available. Ouch.
So what was the right course of action? After all, the passenger was at fault for not paying attention to the multiple announcements about being back to the bus on time. How would have you voted? Drop some ethical knowledge in the comments section and let me know. Also, give me a ride next time so I can avoid these philosophical quandaries.
I assume I’m not the only one who’s noticed that clothing sizes have totally changed in the past 2-3 years or so — what used to be an XL is now only a large, what used to be a large is now a medium, and what used to be XXXL is now somehow listed in the normal-sized range at XL. G confirms that this is the case for women’s clothing too — a size 4 now fits what used to be size 6, size 8 fits a former size 10, etc.
This is pretty clever on the part of marketers, but I have to burst your bubble, you-who-think-you’ve-dropped-a-size: You may fit in a size 6, but unfortunately, you don’t actually fit in a size 6.
Last week I was reading some online commentary about a piece by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, this one about Goldman Sachs. I first read Taibbi in Spanking the Donkey, and I usually like the dude’s cynical, New-Journalism-style writing, even when it’s a bit sensational.
The Goldman Sachs thing — at least the parts I could read, since the whole thing isn’t available online (very Time Inc. circa 2003 move by Rolling Stone) — so then I started reading some of the criticism. One of the articles I read mentioned that Megan McArdle (who I haven’t read before) from the Atlantic wrote a big response to the article, so I decided to go try and find that. I typed this into Google:
We all know search-engine listings are important, so how did HuffPost pull this one off? When I look at the source code, it seems like The Atlantic is missing some simple SEO best-practice stuff that could have helped them out here. HuffPost isn’t kicking ass at SEO coding, exactly, but they’re doing enough of the small stuff right that it’s likely that was enough to get Google to list them over The Atlantic. Running down the basic-level SEO checklist:
Friendly URLs: Sort of a wash; both URLs contain the keyword strings “taibbi” and “atlantic” at some point.
Header tags: Running into some trouble here — HuffPost has the page title “The Atlantic: Taibbi Is ‘Becoming The Sarah Palin Of Journalism’” in an h1 tag, while “Matt Taibbi Gets His Sarah Palin On” is an h3 tag on The Atlantic. That’s a weird one, particularly because there’s no other competing h1 tag on the Atlantic page and we’re looking at an individual post here, not the main page of the blog where you might use the h1 for the blog title.
Meta keywords: Keywords are one of the few meta tags that actually count for search engines, and while they’re downplayed a lot in best-practice techniques compared to the days when people would put 200 keywords into the source code, they still serve a contextual purpose. The Atlantic didn’t even use any — not good, not even as good as the cursory list on the HuffPost page.
Plenty of SEO-consultant advice is voodoo, as Google’s algorithm is a mystery to most, but low-level code tactics like URL structure, meta and header tags make a difference.
HuffPost gets some flak now and then for not doing enough original stuff (or sometimes going beyond that), but in cases like this, they’re grabbing the traffic in a perfectly legal way. Even if they do link through in the end, this is a tangible example to pay attention to best-practice coding when you’re building a site, because otherwise, web dudes will come and G up even those readers specifically looking for your stuff.
I’ve been reading up today on what I once thought was a pretty cool and bold redesign, but now is an evident disaster: the relaunch of Target.com after the company’s break from Amazon.
