If there were a way, in less than five seconds, that you could pay for online content (10 cents, a quarter, a dollar at a time) with no fees, no hassles.
Would the quality of online stuff increase?
Does the existence of a market increase the supply?
Scott McCloud (brilliant, blow you away cartoon theorist, who’s also a cartoonist) has a rant about BitPass. Rather than sending you to the company’s site, start with the rant, because it’s easier to understand the point of view when you see it in opposition to a critic: Misunderstanding Micropayments – Scott McCloud.
Well, I joined BitPass, and I bought Scott’s first online for money comic (it’s really good, and totally worth a quarter.)
As most of you know, I’ve been at (okay, near) the forefront of the “attention equals cash” argument, pointing out that getting someone’s permission is worth far more than getting their quarter. But now that things are settling down online, I wonder if there’s a chance for BOTH to happen.
Take a look.
PS I think BitPass may have a good solution, but I’m sure they’ve got competition. I also know that an aggressive affiliate arrangement would change the entire dynamic of the business for them…
October 5, 2003
Alexa.com does a neat trick. They track all the traffic to just about every site on the web. (Here’s the Related Info for: sethgodin.com/sg/blog/sethgodin.html).
So, it appears that sethgodin.com is about 47,000 on the hit list, but we peaked at about 12,000 (out of a billion sites!) last May.
Conventional wisdom would tell you that if I did search engine optimization and had the blog open daughter windows instead of changing your basic window, and, and, and, I could increase my traffic.
My guess is that for most sites, it doesn’t really matter that much.
Heresy!
Here’s why:
1. The single best thing you can do is change the YIELD of your site, not its raw traffic. That means changing the site to increase the number of people who do what you want them to do, not dumping more people on a broken site.
2. The next best thing you can do is encourage visitors (subtly or not) to get like-minded folks to visit. Meetup.com, for example, has got that just right.
3. You can make the most of the visitors you have by getting permission, by giving visitors the ability to sign up for more info later.
I’ve never tracked my traffic, but I track all of three of these things quite closely. Maybe once I get them all right, I’ll bother to worry about raw numbers. In the meantime, I can’t help but notice that Tom Peters is about 50,000 behind me on the Alexa list, though he has a better reputation, sells more books, changes more lives and writes better than I do.
No matter what the folklore says, traffic doesn’t matter that much if the rest is broken.
October 3, 2003
Mark Hurst has a great column about Four Words to Improve User Research. He’s writing from the point of view of a rigorous UI/design tester. I think the mantra needs to go much further though–looking at the world through a different lens.
I got a call from a hospital, pestering me about a bill I’d gotten a week earlier. The caller then said, “I need to know your birthdate.” Why, I asked. “So I can prove I spoke to you.”
Of course, I don’t care at all about their systems or their management tools or their productivity. I don’t care that someone thought this was a clever way to manage their many callers. I just know that telling this guy my birthdate wasn’t going to help me at all, so I said no.
When people interact with your site, your product, or your company, you don’t have the luxury of telling them a story first. You don’t get to give a speech about WHY it is the way it is. It just is. So the experience must stand on its own.
If you find this in a local store, Pizza Scented Bubble Bath, please send me a bottle.
thank you.
Important point: if it’s remarkable to the manufacturer, it doesn’t matter. If it’s important to the user, then it has a chance of being remarkable. In other words, ” no one cares about you.”
October 2, 2003
a digital camera. Kevin’s MoBlog
October 1, 2003
…hard to kill.
As a society, we’ve gotten pretty good at launching new things. New ideas, new technologies, new flavors.
But we’re really bad at killing off the bad stuff. They still sell hot dogs at ball games. We still have answering machines at home. And, as Bruce Sterling points out, we still have incandescent light bulbs. Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die
The question worth asking is: Could our organizations (big and small) get better at regularly discarding what doesn’t work any more? (he says as he types on a qwerty keyboard giving him carpal tunnel).
Yesterday, I got 255 pieces of spam between 3 pm and 5 pm. My friend Michael gets 500 a day. And a journalist I know, Rebecca, gets 5,000 every weekend. For those that think spam is just a nuisance, add a zero and then think about it. How long would it take YOU to sort through and delete 5,000 emails?
A problem with our networked world is that so many problems are becoming exponential ones.
The thing about spam that’s really surprising and makes me distraught is that previously reputable marketers (but lazy ones, apparently) are willing to risk their entire brand for a few bucks. Herb Cohen, who’s a fine writer, is apparently working with Warner (who should know better) on this sort of scheme. Publishers Weekly writes:
> For her next trick, McColl will do a one-day blast for Herb Cohen’s
> new book, “Negotiate This! By Caring, But Not T-H-A-T Much.” Published
> by Warner Books, the title is now sitting at number 838 at Amazon. On
> Oct. 7, an e-mail will go out with a sales pitch similar to the one
> sent for “The Saint.” The message will promise $644 worth of free
> self-help material for buying on that day. It will proclaim that Cohen
> wants his book, “at the top of the Amazon.com charts today, October
> 7th and he needs your help to make it happen, and for doing so, he has
> created an offer that will have you stunned.”
Peggy McColl is a spammer, sending out more than a million emails at a time to people, directing them to Amazon to buy “self-help” books. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t ask Peggy to send me mail. Is this the worst kind of V*agra sort of spam? No, of course not. That’s why it bothers me so much. Once the harvesting of sort-of approximately-maybe it’s-kind-of-focused-by-topic opt-out spam becomes socially acceptable, you can certainly bet that we’ll be adding one or two more zeroes to the volume of spam that comes in every day.
The ironic twist is that Amazon spent about $33 a person building their truly permission-based opt-in list. For someone to walk in and spend .1% of that in order to have a thin shroud of respectability pulls the entire structure apart. It means that anyone who markets the right way has an even harder time starting tomorrow.
If you know Peggy or Herb or Warner, drop them a line. Let them know that acting like the DMA–that assuming that people WANT to get your junk–is a great way to ruin their brand.
A long time ago, pundits started declaring the death of the banner ad. By and large they were right–banner ads now get clickthroughs that peak at .1%, the cost per thousand is close to zero and Google and others have demonstrated that contextual text ads are far more effective.
Yet, these banner ads (in a variety of shapes and sizes) persist. What stuns me is not that they continue to hang around, but that they’re used so poorly, and (I’m hypothesizing here) so little testing is done.
Here’s an ad for the revived go.com:
Click on it (yes, some people do) and it takes you to:
I’m just amazed that this is the best they could come up with. Where’s the call to action? Why is this a better service? How does this answer the promise of the banner I clicked on? Have they tested different approaches?
The key to the process is simple: banners make a promise. Offer pages continue the promise and provide evidence that the solution is proven, legitimate and effective. If you test these steps, your yield has to go up. If it goes up, your costs go down.
September 29, 2003
Looking over the last few posts, I worry that I’m falling into the cynical web trap. What if it’s contagious? What if it’s so easy to do stuff that’s critical that we forget how to do great stuff? Then you find something like the Acumen Fund”, which is changing the world (for the better) one person at a time, and it’s easy to remember that it’s worth the effort.
September 25, 2003
