If pageview inflation was an artform, the Huffington Post would be its Leonardo da Vinci. If they didn’t invent the art of linkbaiting (Nice bikini, Demi!), gaming Google News (let’s just say their SEO is optimized), social media integration (although perhaps they’ve taken it too far), pot-stirring opinion-based blog posts that lead to even more comments, polls, photo galleries, and monster verticals, they have certainly mastered all of them. And I point this out with nothing but respect. Their perfection of this black art has lead to their first year in the black, an inspiring feat. And they keep rolling out the hits.
Today I noticed for the first time, although I suspect it’s been there for a while, the ad supported pop-up teaser. This little speed bump in the information highway is the Huffington Post’s way of doubling down. Only a mature pageview master could pull it off. They’re so confident that you’re going to click through to give them the 5 or so ad impressions that they really want that they’re willing to risk it all for that extra 1 ad impression they get when you click on a headline in the “Most Popular” feed. It’s so … bold. For their most popular content, they’re saying two clicks is the price admission. And they know they’ve got you. Because after that first click, you’re not going to give up. You’re not a quitter. You’re going to click through and give them that extra ad impression. Bravo, HuffPo, bravo.
Is it just me or has Tumblr spoiled me to the point where I cannot even enjoy a well designed blog anymore?
The redesigned DealBook is sharp, tidy and clean—but functional? Yes, it’s easy to browse posts in a tight reverse chron—and the silhos are a nice touch—but I want to be able to do more and I don’t want to have to click through to a post to do it; I want to be able to read the entire content of the post and share it on the blog’s landing page; I want more posts to automatically appear as I scroll down the page; I want more funny memes (ok, maybe they can’t help me there).
I want Tumblr—even when I’m not on Tumblr. I know that’s unfair, to ask the designers and developers at NYTimes.com to Tumblrize their blogs. But what I’m really asking is that they do what Tumblr does which is put the reading experience before pageviews. I fear the priority of the click is stunting design.
giving us further hint of an imminent redesign at nytimes.com, today the paper launched a refreshed dealbook.
How one company games Google News
Tom Krazit on Google News:
But if the company is unable to train its algorithms to detect this kind of news spamming strategy, one of Google’s greatest fears—that people will rely more on information curated by friends on Facebook or Twitter as opposed to search—could come true.
This is a huge, huge problem for Google. Both Google and Google News are increasingly swamped by spam for any news search I do. Twitter/Facebook is much, much more reliable because my friends are going to share spam.
Google News is also much slower than Twitter or Facebook at surfacing this breaking news.
The system itself seems fairly broken.
It’s absolutely broken and this article only focuses on half of the problem. It’s not only that disreputable news organizations game the system, but reputable ones, too. EVERYONE tries to game Google News. The algorithm does not seem to distinguish between reportage and rewrites or between primary and secondary sources. They only care about the “quality” of the site, not the quality of the reporting, and their response to CNET bares this out.
Since there is a lot at stake here for all news organizations—a link from Google News is the difference between a good traffic day and a great traffic day, between making your month and not—it’s very tempting for news organizations to chase after links and trends, perhaps drawing resources away from chasing stories. It’s all part of the pageview economy.
Is SEO to blame for the rise of Sarah Palin?
Mickey Kaus (who has moved Kausfiles to Newsweek):
Write anything about Sarah Palin on the web and it gets lots of hits. As Slate’s Dave Weigel has pointed out, this is a key source of Palin’s power: the press will cover everything she does three times over because they desperately need the Web traffic (and ad sales) she generates. Try that with Tim Pawlenty and see where it gets you. Maybe Gawker’s Nick Denton demands “More Lady Gaga”—but at political web sites they demand “More Sarah Palin.” So when Halperin declares “Attn. Media and Politicans: It’s All About Palin,” he isn’t iconoclastically telling the media establishment to shift course. He’s telling them to do what they want to do and are already doing.
It may sound absurd, but there’s more truth to this than people know.
Congratulations, M-W.com! You finally got rid of the dull blue border (remember?). The new design is definitely cleaner and easier to read.
One interesting challenge of note: since the content is just definitions, the interior pages tend to be very short. This reduces the amount of space between the 5 ads, the banner ad in the header, the two boxes in the right rail, the skyscraper in the left, and the banner in the footer. This is a pretty standard way sites have of increasing their number of ad impressions. Normally, pages with this many ads are naturally vertical, placing a comfortable space between the ads. This is not the case on M-W.com. I find it distracting. I know they need to make their money to keep the site free, but I wonder why they can’t eliminate at least two on the interior pages, so that the content isn’t overwhelmed by the flashing and the blinking. Isn’t the priority here to service the written word?
Welcome to a new feature here on Brooks in Beta that I’m calling Click Click Boom, where I point out the little (and sometimes not so little) tricks sites use to boost page views, sometimes at the expense of a quality user experience. Don’t get me wrong, some of these are quite ingenious and this should not be taken as a condemnation of anyone’s design.
Today’s, however, is somewhere in that gray area between good and bad: The linkage landing page. A tweet from Business Insider lead me to the page above.
The bad: The site has added an extra obstacle to the user finding what they want.
The good: It allows Business Insider to host a conversation amongst its readers. Moreover, a well written link could be an enticement to that conversation.
