John Bell: Blog
It's like Twitter on Ritalin
Passing Through: Less Than Free Software
Nov 18th
Image by Federico Fieni
I then asked my friend, “so why would they ever use the Google (non open source) license version.” (EDIT: One of the commenters below pointed out that all Android is open source, and the Google apps pack, including the GPS, is licensed on top. Doesn’t change the argument, but wanted the correct data included here.) Here was the big punch line – because Google will give you ad splits on search if you use that version! That’s right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. I like to call this the “less than free” business model. This is a remarkable card to play. Because of its dominance in search, Google has ad rates that blow away the competition. To compete at an equally “less than free” price point, Symbian or windows mobile would need to subsidize. Double ouch!!
From the “Google is the new Microsoft” department: Bill Gurley writes about Google’s bundling offer of free turn-by-turn navigation with their Android mobile OS, and how it’s a case of Google using their dominance as leverage to pay people to adopt their product. Hmm…where have I heard this before? Though the practice isn’t quite as new as Gurley makes it sound, the article is interesting because it goes into the relationships Google established and broke off as it’s Maps service developed. Again, there’s a familiar template: Buy data and expertise until you can ramp up your own service that competes with the people you were just partnered with at a level that ensures you will win.
I do have to wonder, though, if building critical data applications on a framework that is dependent upon advertising dollars is a good idea. Look at what has happened to journalism, a socially-critical industry that became tied to advertising money–the almost inevitable response to increased competition has been the development of outlets like Fox and MSNBC. Google’s less than free model may be tying people to their version of Android for the moment, but that will only last as long as it takes for somebody to figure out how to make more money using the true open source version of Android than they can get from Google’s kickbacks. When the competition inevitably increases, what happens then? Can Google continue to make money without coloring their data to make whatever constituents give them the most cash happy? With other mapping companies having been put out of business in the interim, it could well turn into another case of money-generated reality.
via Google Redefines Disruption: The “Less Than Free” Business Model « abovethecrowd.com.
Digestion: Users Love Stupid Content
Sep 17th
Image by Kevin Marks
Twitter has become a playground for imbeciles, skeevy marketers, D-list celebrity half-wits, and pathetic attention seekers: Shaquille O’Neal, Kim Kardashian, Ryan Seacrest. Sure, some serious people, like George Stephanopoulos and Al Gore, use Twitter. And a lot of publishing companies and bloggers (myself included) use Twitter to send links to articles we’ve published. But most of what streams across Twitter is junk. One recent study concluded that 40 percent of the messages are “pointless babble.”
Really? 40% of Twitter messages are “pointless babble”? Maybe it’s just me, but compared to television, radio, blogs, and, well, everyday conversations, that’s an amazingly good signal-to-noise ratio.
While Daniel Lyons catches up with those of us who have seen Idiocracy, a couple of other thoughts:
- $55 million in venture capital I can see. But is somebody going to pay $1 billion to acquire Twitter, the company that has trumpeted how unconcerned it is with making money?
- Twitter has an audience…but what kind of audience is it? Twitter users have become accustomed to filtering their messages precisely because of the spam, inane comments, and misdirected personal replies that fill the network. How responsive are Twitter users going to be compared to users of traditional web sites?
- The introduction of AdSense to gmail was one of the key moments in turning Google from the “don’t be evil” company into a burgeoning Big Brother. It was seen as significant for two reasons: the ads were being placed in the context of personal communications, and Google was scanning email for keywords to target ad placements. Twitter would be vulnerable to the first claim, but what about the second? It seems like contextual placement would be the best/only way to effectively advertise on Twitter, but with that be subject to as big a backlash as gmail saw?
- Twitter’s service is already pretty bad, quite frankly. Constant server outages, flaky search, and no real support system adds up to a service that probably would have been abandoned were it not free. Are users going to put up with bad service when they have to see ads as well? Are advertisers going to pay to place ads on a network that always seems to be a stiff breeze away from collapse?
Interesting Things: EAFail
Sep 16th
EA has a new game coming out, shockingly enough. You might be able to guess its name from the image above, or maybe you can tell it from the couple of times it was mentioned in Ars’ coverage of its controversial advertising campaign.
Why exactly it’s controversial, though, I’m not sure. It’s really not doing anything any worse than advertisers have done in the past, and it’s far better than many. The interesting part is that they’re actually admitting what they’re doing. As in many things, it’s all about framing an action with an idea, and EA has decided that their idea is sin. The fact that what they identify as sin is no different than what goes on all the time is a bit telling about the advertising industry in general.
I suspect what people are really reacting to is two things: the trap and the exposure. It’s a trap in the sense that there’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t sense for the people who would like to react negatively to the campaign. If they talk about it, it’s advertising, if they don’t, they’re missing the opportunity to throw stones (and who doesn’t want to do that?). Exposure is what I already mentioned; these are the things that go on all the time anyway, and now they’re being labeled as sin. That people are outraged by it is even more telling about the level of cognitive dissonance that’s floating around in the average ad target’s brain.
Digestion: Is Social Advertising an Oxymoron?
Sep 16th
Frank Rose’s Wired column asks if advertising on social networking sites is inherently a flawed process because users aren’t interested in advertising in the same place that they’re talking to their friends. (Ted McConnell, head of interactive marketing and innovation at Procter & Gamble, even has the priceless quote: “What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”) But after reading Rose’s reasoning, I’m left with a few questions:
- What in heaven’s name made anybody think advertising was a good idea anywhere? Haven’t advertisers been complaining that viewers skip ads ever since the invention of the VCR? Much less the DVR, TiVo was supposedly the death knell for the entire ad-supported TV system.
- Along similar lines, what made anybody think clickthroughs are a good way to measure the effectiveness of advertising? The clickthrough rate on television ads is 0%, same as newspapers, magazines, and the little blow-in cards that fall out of catalogs. Until the web, advertisers never expected immediate response to their ads, so a consumer could be sitting at home watching TV, interacting with their family (for certain values of “interacting”) and still be considered a valid target for ads. Why is the goal of TV ads long-term brand recognition and the goal of web ads immediate reaction?
- There’s a key line in this article: “[…] at least viral videos provide some entertainment value — which is a lot more than you can say for those Social Ads on Facebook.” Social ads fail because they do not provide entertainment. Despite Ted McConnell’s ideas, there is no reason why people are unwilling to mix socializing with advertising, as long as the advertising is actually entertaining. Do TV ads just show a screen full of text for 30 seconds? Of course, people are annoyed with TV ads and would be with web ads as well; but there is an inherent quid pro quo in advertising, and when viewers don’t feel they’re getting their eyeball-time’s-worth, they’ll completely shut down.
- Rose focuses on astroturfed ads on YouTube made by traditional ad companies and notes that, not only do people know they’re astroturfed, but they don’t even generate any money for YouTube itself. That’s changed somewhat, as YouTube has been making more and more sponsored videos available. But that is only half of the problem Rose discusses…the other half is that the astroturfed ads are still being made by ad companies and so they don’t fit in with the rest of YouTube’s content. Why is there not a program where YouTube takes advertising contracts and makes them available as contests for user-generated content? The advertiser gets their ads, YouTube gets a cut for hosting, and actual users get paid for the content they’re making (and probably far less than the ad company they’re replacing, so the advertiser actually ends up saving money in the end). Advertising on broadcast is easy because companies are good at making broadcast ads; advertising on peer-to-peer requires buying in to the entire peer-to-peer mindset and making ads that fit the medium, even if that means letting somebody else make them for you.
Interesting Things: Placebos Do More Nothing Than They Used To
Sep 7th
Wired had an article a couple weeks ago* on studies showing that the placebo effect is more effective now than it used to be. It seems that while the big US drug companies thought they were just fleecing customers with massive ad campaigns ever since the FDA allowed direct advertising in 1997, they were actually healing them! That’s the theory being advanced in the article, at least. Interestingly enough, it points in the direction of drugs being assisted by holistic care–not in the odd pseudo-sciencey way the term is often used, but using the real definition and viewing the entire human body as an interdependent system rather than relying only on precisely targeted drugs and therapies.
*In unrelated news, Slashdot appears to have missed the 60-second news cycle memo.
Digestion: What’s Your Viral Loop?
Sep 5th
Image by Aldo Frullini
Thinking about Andrew Chen’s What’s your viral loop? Understanding the engine of adoption:
- Understanding that Chen is specifically focusing on viral loops, it’s still interesting that he lists the last step in the process as finding onramps–that is, identifying the media that will support the loop you’re trying to build. I can see the theory is that you have control over your loop and so it should be designed first with the idea that it should support many different onramps, but I see it as a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. He’s making the assumption that your loop will exist in an easily portable container like Flash and so you can therefore wait until the end, but what happens if you have a service that requires more? (I know easy answer is to redesign the service, but that’s not always possible.)
- Chen’s techniques include considering the content, but are mostly content neutral and assume you’re trying to draw people into a service. What happens when you’re only dealing with content, though? A blog, for example, has no inherent lock-in and the only real opportunity to have it go viral is by piggybacking off other distribution formats like social networks. What’s more, those still only really promote individual posts, not the service itself. Users coming from a viral post have to go upstream and make the decision to add the blog to their social network / rss / twitter / bookmarks / browsing habits.
- Not sure how much I like his enthusiasm with forcing the sharing step earlier and earlier into the funnel. Maybe it’s just me, but I always find this behavior to be obnoxious. (Facebook is really bad, the amount of in-your-faceness pretty much turned me off to the site completely.) Chen talks about losing a lot of potential users at every step of the loop, so why give them another reason to leave? It seems to work off the same theory as spam, but I question what the difference is between total users and quality users.
- Continuing that last thought, this article really highlights that viral loops are about initial contamination, not ongoing use. It’s the difference between Ebola and a chronic case of Hepatitis C. Ebola is self-limiting because it burns through its host too quickly to allow it to spread (thankfully). Hep C can live in a host for decades and use its host to spread for that entire period. Viral marketing efforts so far seem to be mostly focused on the Ebola model; what would it take to design a viral campaign around the Hep C model? Or even better, creating a legion of Typhoid Marys? That might go back to why viral campaigns are generally not good at branding.
Creeping Inevitability: AdSense for Feeds
Sep 4th
Well, the creeping may have been done in the past since the news is pretty old at this point, but it scores high enough on the inevitability scale to make up for it. Google has a service that inserts their AdSense ads into RSS feeds. The program hasn’t exactly taken off, but then again, neither has RSS as a whole, depending on what you think RSS is really for.
RSS is supposed to be about syndication (hence the name). Historically, syndication models haven’t tried to send content direct from the author to the consumer, they just spread content to a number of different outlets that then sell the aggregation of that content (see also: newspapers). People have an idea that RSS is about direct-to-customer distribution, and that has been reinforced by all the newsreader programs that are out there and several years of hype. But it is even more powerful when it’s actually used for syndication: getting my content on another website is more useful to me than getting my content sent directly to the user. If my content is on another site then that is publicity that can draw in completely new audiences. Sending my content to the user is convenient for the user and potentially makes them ‘stickier’, but it also deprives my site of hits and can only reach one person at a time. To put it in MBA terms, RSS is far more powerful when it’s used in a business-to-business model than direct-sale.
I’m a little shaky on the idea of 3rd party ads being inserted in RSS because it isn’t most effective as a direct to the user technology and it makes my feed less attractive to other content providers. I know that, as a developer, if I wanted to use a feed on my site and saw it had ads in it the first thing I would do is filter them out (assuming I didn’t just drop the feed completely). I gain nothing by letting somebody else sell ad space on my site, and as a practical matter, none of my sites are intended to be commercial so ads would just look out of place. If the theory is that AdSense allows content producers to monetize RSS feeds it seems like the market just isn’t there to support it.
Interesting Things: Ignore the Pirates
Sep 4th
A while ago Ars had a writeup on Stardock’s CEO saying that they think copy protection is counter-productive. Here’s the money quote:
“The reason why we don’t put copy protection on our games isn’t because we’re nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don’t like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don’t count”
It’s a pretty obvious point that’s been brought up again and again in the RIAA/MPAA quagmire. Another word for piracy is advertising. Depending on which study you look at, piracy has either a neutral or positive effect on sales. The logic is pretty simple: downloaders tend to download because their either don’t have the money to pay or because whatever it is they’re downloading isn’t available through other convenient means. Either way, there’s no sale lost. On the other hand, sales are often gained when the halo effect kicks in and users buy associated content based on what they’ve already seen.
In the case of software it’s usually worse because the copy protection tends to be more intrusive than a DVD’s passive CSS encryption or a CD’s Autoplay blocker (though not always). Software that phones home not only has potential privacy implications but also becomes dependent upon the company keeping their servers running. It enforces the legal point that you’re really just licensing software, not buying it, even when you get it on a DVD at Best Buy. I wouldn’t get too comfortable with iTunes or Amazon either…just wait for Windows Live.
Interesting Things: Add-Art
Sep 4th
Add-Art is a free FireFox add-on which replaces advertising on websites with curated art images. The art shows are updated every two weeks and feature contemporary artists and curators.
Interesting project that goes a step beyond AdBlock (which it’s based on) and replaces ad images on a site with something they find a bit more desirable. It works by tapping into FireFox’s user base. Making their project into a plugin makes keeping people’s attention irrelevant; since a plugin is a one-time install, all they need to do is grab your notice for a few seconds and your participation is locked-in until you manually go in and uninstall. Like impulse buying, they don’t need you for any longer than it takes you to plunk down your cash or hit install.
