User Experience or the Bottomline?
Tuesday, July 19th, 2005 by Paul Scrivens
We place high value on the user’s experience on our websites. We like to think that if we do what’s best for the user, then if there is money involved with a site it will inevitably follow. Almost every successful company that I can think of takes this approach with either their websites or products. Google does it, Flickr does it, Digg does it, Blinksale does it, and so does Campaign Monitor just to name a few.
Putting the user first is very rarely a losing situation, yet there is usually a time in a companies’ existence where they forget about the user and begin to focus solely on the money. It happened with many of the portals in the late 90’s and it is happening now with Microsoft and PC manufacturers.
AJAX is the technology of the year so far (although it isn’t new) because of the recent functionality is has brought to today’s web applications. However, as a company that thrives on ad dollars how should this technology effect your business model? It shouldn’t and this is why this entry by Jason Calacanis of Weblogs, Inc. irks me so much:
We’ve looked at ten different ideas for AJAZ (sic) in Blogsmith (our blog software) and we’ve decided to keep all the AJAX on the blogger (i.e. publisher) side of the business and “force” the users to deal with page reloads so we can make (or not lose) money.
…
The truth for any blog with comments is that the comment page refreshes are 10-20% of a site’s traffic (maybe more on community sites like Slashdot). Given how close to the bone running a blog business is you really can’t afford to lose anything, let alone double digits. Page views are what it’s all about I’m afraid.
Emphasis mine.
Does this seem wrong to anybody else? It’s analogous to car companies not looking into ways to increase gas mileage because they want you to go to the gas station more.
Provide a better user experience and I believe you will find that your audience grows making up for any “lost” pageviews. If the competition does you one better you will be losing pageviews to them and not to a technology that should only be used to help you (Gmail anyone?).
Let’s look at Digg for example.
Digg
Digg.com lets users link to entries on other sites in specific categories and if they receive enough diggs they get placed on the frontpage (nothing new really). In version one if you “digged” a site you had to wait for a page refresh. However, now with their slick 2.0 redesign when you digg a site you can just keep on going without the worries of a page refresh.
Jason worries that this is taking away from the pageviews of Digg and therefore hurting their bottomline. I would say that this is completely wrong. I think Digg will now have more unique visitors (much more important than pageviews) and more loyal users (much more important to Digg for the long run) because of the great v2.0 improvements. Also because the site has become that much more easier to use, people are more likely to go breeze through more pages than ever before.
Our CTO of 9rules, Colin Devroe, asked Kevin Rose of Digg how many pageviews they receive and it was 1.2 million pageviews daily (yeah, that’s an insane number). Then he asked how many he got for the pre-AJAX 1.0 version and he said about 70% of that. Good thing they didn’t lose too many pageviews…
Trying to do what is best for your users is usually the most rewarding thing your company can do from a social and financial perspective. With the 9rules Network we put our members and readers first and financially speaking this doesn’t help us in the short term to make that much money (what you currently see is about 20% of the business plan in action). However, in the long term I am positive we will be better off than many of the other blog (content) networks, and our members will be just as happy or even more so. We will never sacrifice our members’ or users’ experience to make a buck, but that’s just how we do things.
So I guess for now we will just stick with making people happy and eating Ramen.
Reader Comments
13 Responses to “User Experience or the Bottomline?”
Where to start…
#1 Ajax doesn’t mean enhanced user experience. Sure it can but that doesn’t mean it will. In the cases you mention though it certainly seems to benefit the user. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not an either/or situaition. You don’t apply some Ajax and get a better experience.
#2 I think Jason’s basic logic is flawed anyway. I guess more pageviews=more money, but how those situations where adding Ajax count (in an advertiser’s mind anyway) as “true” pageviews is beyond me. I don’t know what his advertising model is, but I just don’t see how any of this would cause him to lose money. I mean, he could always just have the page reload every 5 seconds if he really wanted more pageviews…???
#3 As far as a better user experience being good for your bottomline in the long run…I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I think there is a balance that has to be struck. Advertising does nothing at all to increase user expereice and more often hurts it. Here you have a direct conflict between user and business needs. Still, I don’t see how anything you just mentioned as an example throws that balance so far to the user side as to, as Jason says, “kill advertising revenue.”
Trying to improve the experience of your users is almost always a good thing. There are times you’ll have a conflict and there you need to compromise. Sounds like here that the improvments were marked enough to see a vast increase in readership — I doubt Jason would see the same, so it probably makes sense for him to leave well enough alone.
July 19th, 2005 at 1:01 pm
It’s analogous to car companies not looking into ways to increase gas mileage because they want you to go to the gas station more.
That’s not a particularly good analogy, because car manufacturers (at least over here in the UK) don’t make money from the sale of petrol so there’s no incentive for them to encourage you to fill up more. In fact it’s in their best interests to reduce fuel consumption because that’s a selling point given that you can get cheaper car tax and of course spend less on petrol as well. A better analogy might be with printer manufacturers who do make money from the consumables and therefore could be said to have a vested interest in not making their products as efficient as possible (I’m not saying that they do this, but there is a reason why they might consider it).
Having said that, I do believe that Jason is heading in the wrong direction by concentrating on page views. Sure, in the good old days when you could sell 1,000 advertisement impressions for $100 on popular sites it might have been something to look at, but I don’t think forcing people to refresh the page makes them any more likely to click on an advertisement. In fact he could actually use some client side technology to automatically refresh ads without requiring a full page refresh if he wanted to increase impressions.
July 19th, 2005 at 1:29 pm
Keith: I never said that using AJAX guarantees a better experience. There are many cases where it is getting used poorly like Flash. My argument is that you shouldn’t lessen the user’s experience simply for more pageviews.
Paul: Yeah I figured I would get called out on that analogy, but left it because I figured the point would still get across.
July 19th, 2005 at 2:02 pm
Scrivs — Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that you were saying that. It was pointed more towards Jason.
July 19th, 2005 at 2:52 pm
Well now everything makes sense then. :-)
July 19th, 2005 at 3:11 pm
I almost wrote this exact same post. Some of his statements also “irked” me. It just sounded plain greedy.
July 19th, 2005 at 7:12 pm
I think in fairness to Jason you might’ve missed the main point of his post -
“…we’ve spent 10 years selling advertisers the “page view.” We’re not going to be able to sell them on any new metric any time soon…
Having worked for a couple of advertising agencies, I can attest that Jason has a valid point. Most, agencies like to stick to the tried and true method of doing something. Only when it’s be substantially proven a new method will work (only when it can be measured can it be managed) will they go with it.
I would argue that is also the reason why you’re seeing a slow adaption (generally) to full CSS by agencies that do websites as well.
July 20th, 2005 at 12:09 am
Page views do equal revenue, and although I don’t particularly enjoy agreeing with the guy, Jason is right in this case. I think his understanding of AJAX is only cursory, but he does very clearly understand the relationship between Weblogs, Inc’s revenue and Weblogs, Inc’s pageviews.
I don’t particularly agree with the digg.com example because digg.com’s growth between the two periods you mentioned is not due to AJAX. They were small, they are now medium-sized, and somewhere in between, they began using some AJAX. There is little correlation between these events.
I do very much agree with the larger picture you’re painting here in that user experience is quite valuable in both the short and long term, but trust me from working five years in major media, advertising is sometimes a game in which you must play by someone else’s rules. Yes, you could use AJAX to refresh ads upon every user interaction but this goes against many longstanding principles and would likely not even make it through an advertiser audit. The one exception to this rule, however, is if what you’re interacting with can be deemed a true “application”. For instance, at ESPN our GameCasts were Flash applications spawned in separate browser windows. Since it’s a true application and the whole thing is on your screen at all times, client-side ad refreshes were completely acceptable. Not sure how something like that could be pulled off on a weblog network though.
There are still a LOT of economics to be worked out in the web advertising world so this is all subject to change, but as of now, more pageviews do equal more revenue.
July 20th, 2005 at 1:04 am
Mark and Mike: I think both of you are missing what I am really saying. I think Jason is saying it’s okay to keep ways to artificially inflate pageviews on a site, while I am saying why not spend your time thinking of better ways to enhance your site so you recieve more visitors and enticing them to stay longer and view more pages.
I am not naive enough to think that pageviews do not equal dollars since we are in this publishing game as well, but instead of pulling out some “tricks” I’d rather go about things a bit differently.
July 20th, 2005 at 1:52 am
I would argue that is also the reason why you’re seeing a slow adaption (generally) to full CSS by agencies that do websites as well.
For those of who work at traditional ad agencies AND produce websites in valid CSS/XHTML, it means more revenue, smiply because we’re outplaying the competition, without them even knowing it.
An increasing number of clients recognize and even seek out the benefits of working with agencies like ours. For those stuck in the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mode, I say thanks, we appreciate the business :)
geof
July 20th, 2005 at 11:13 am
Regardless of the technology employed, I believe forcing people to use mulitple page views (for the sake of ad revenue) when a single page view would provide a better experience is a flawed business model.
Why? Because if you’re not the one providing the better experience, someone else will be. One important thing we have to remember in this instance is that weblog content (for the most part) is free. It does not cost enything to the user.
It hacks me off that MSNBC and ESPN (sorry Mike) have started splitting articles into multiple pages in order to feed me more page views in hopes that maybe this time I’ll go ahead and subscribe to Maxim. Fact is, I didn’t subscribe last month. Not going to subscribe this month. Now, I understand these ads make money for ESPN regardless, and I’m sure plenty of people click on the swimsuit model ads.
That said, as soon as someone provides me a better way to read, obtain, or consume that information… I’m gone. ESPN has a leg up, because they have decent writers. I’ll spend extra time there, because I like reading Marc Stein, even if it takes me a few clicks.
However, when it comes to weblogs, we have to all admit that the bar is dropped a bit. I couldn’t name you a writer on Weblogs, Inc. save Calacanis, Alvey, and Mark Cuban. I read Engadget, but I don’t know who in the world writes the stuff. If I can find relatively the same information elsewhere, I’m gone. I have no built-in loyalty to Weblogs, Inc., Jason Calacanis, Nick Denton, or Paul Scrivens.
As a reader, I am going to read content where it is most easily accessible to me. And if a better user-experience means that the site employs some amount of AJAX which leads to better pages views, I don’t care. I’m simply going to enjoy the better user experience.
And if this means lost ad revenue because of decreased page views, then you’d better start figuring out a better way monetize your content (via ads or otherwise) because if you’re not, I guarantee someone else is.
July 20th, 2005 at 11:21 am
Josh: Totally agree about the pagination thing. That is over-the-line for me. It’s funny, some people over there pitched it as a way to “make pages of a more readable length”. Ha!
HA!
It’s no secret that pagination is all about revenue and it pisses me off probably even more than it pisses you off. At least ESPN had the sense to offer a “single view” button, but still… no good.
I think the difference though (while a subtle one), is that in the case of pagination, you are actually adding page views to the norm. While in the case of AJAX, you are subtracting page views from the norm. What Jason is saying is that he’s “just fine with the norm” right now and he doesn’t feel like subtracting from it right now. Is that in the users’ best interest? Probably not. But it’s in Weblogs Inc.’s immediate best interest and it’s already built into the expectations of the user.
Scrivs: I don’t think the two things you just mentioned are incompatible. You can keep traditional ways of generating page views alive while also thinking of ways to enhance your site. Users’ tolerances for minor annoyances are relatively high. If you can keep pushing relevant content their way, they will remain loyal.
My much bigger problem with Weblogs, Inc.’s strategy these days is sheer quantity of posts. They treat their sites as if newsreaders didn’t exist. In other words, they seem to expect everyone to just hit their front page every hour and always seem something new. While this works today, I think it becomes a major annoyance when everyone is using newsreaders. It’s the very reason why I finally unsubscribed to Engadget last week. Gizmodo gives me 20 new items a day. Engadget is more like 60 these days. Too much completely irrelevant shit. Too much noise.
July 20th, 2005 at 4:52 pm
Mike: It’s quantity AND quality. I don’t read any of the Weblogs, Inc. stuff because it’s mostly poorly written, uninteresting and irrelevant.
When you pile that up, what do you get? A pile of crap. ;)
July 20th, 2005 at 6:03 pm
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