Towards the beginning of the year I made an offer to anyone that is interested that they could advertise on this site for a $1200 flat rate that would cover the entire year. A couple of people jumped on board and I thought it would be nice to talk a bit about the experience.
When I first started taking sponsors on this site I gave them two ad sizes: 234×60 and 468×60. 234×60 isn’t very common, but its the one we use on 9rules so I was very comfortable with it and like the creative freedom it gives advertisers and site owners without debasing the actual site. Initially clickthrough (CTR) hovered around 3%-5% and after a couple of weeks dipped to 1%-2%, which isn’t surprising if the readers are seeing the same sites.
A couple of months later I switched the site design and changed the sponsors to a single textad at the top and was a bit surprised at the results. Note, the advertisers didn’t change at all just the formatting of the ads and yet CTR rose back to 5%-6% and this stayed consistent for about 2 months without any changes to the advertisers. Now we are back down to 1%-3% since the ads themselves haven’t changed, which I don’t find very surprising at all.
So what happened here is essentially the same thing that happens on 9rules in that ad creatives can get very stale with your audience. It isn’t about making your ads standout necessarily, but changing them over time can work wonders with your CTR. For the 2007 run of Wisdump I am planning on trying to get each of the site’s sponsors to rotate creatives on a monthly basis as a site owner can only do so much to encourage ad clickthroughs without taking away from the site itself.
I know over the past two years there has been talk of textads performing better than their graphical counterparts, but with the experience of both Wisdump and 9rules I can honestly say that graphical works just as well as text as long as it fits in with the site. Gawdy ads that intentionally try to make your readers ignore them are a burden not only to your bottom line, but also to the results that advertisers might be looking for.
One of the most aggressive companies this year with regards to advertising on a number of sites is Text Link Ads. Now I’m sure you have seen their affiliate buttons on a number of websites, but that’s not the impressive part. If you have watched their ads on 9rules, TechCrunch or The Deck you may or may not have noticed that their ads change on a fairly regular basis. Now “regular” in the sense of the ad industry could mean every one to two months, but that is much better than a lot of others that I have come across this year. I have yet to see a decrease in the amount of money they are putting in advertising so I would guess that it has paid off well for them and it’s not hard to see why.
When it comes to clickthroughs there are a couple of factors that have to come into play for both site owners and advertisers.
- The Ad Creative. Is it attractive? Does the copy pull people in? Ads are easy to create, but great ads take time to think over just like great sites. You want to advertise because you want to spread the word about your product then you should definitely take the time to perfect your ad creatives. Make multiple ones and test them out to see which ones get the best response and when that is done create some more because those new ones just became old after the reader has seen them for the fifth time.
- The Site Design. How well does the ad fit in with the site’s design? When planning sites now we no longer have to plan just for our audience, but also the needs of our sponsors. Readers always come first, but you don’t want a design that doesn’t leave room for ads to work well because then you are just going to piss off both readers and advertisers.
Next entry I will go over the sponsor plan for Wisdump in 2007 and what new approaches I plan to take.
I’m sure we have all heard the expression “eating your own dog food”. What it refers to is building something and actually using it for yourself. An example would be everyone at Yahoo actually using Yahoo Mail instead of GMail. Think about it, how often do you use your own site?
Before we launched 9rules Notes, we often wondered why people didn’t stay on our site longer and use it and while the answers were obvious we found that we couldn’t expect people to use the site if we weren’t using it ourselves. So we began to brainstorm on how we could make the site more interactive, while still growing the brand and helping our Members in the process and because of this 9rules Notes was born.
Now the 9rules team actually uses the site every single day just like everyone else and because of this we have become more aware of what needs to be improved. Before it was easy planning a design, implementing a design and then walking away expecting everything to be grand. But once we began using the site we found that it was a completely different story.
Not that we don’t want to improve the site for our Members and users, but we want to improve it even faster because we are using it and there are things we want to see happen. Maybe that’s stupid motivation and a bit selfish, but either way, improvements help everyone out.
Think about your own site, even if it is a blog. Do you really use it besides posting an entry and maybe some followup comments? How often do we think about our designs and implement the ideas that we think are good without actually trying them out over an extended period of time? I spent the last couple of days actually using Wisdump and let me tell you, it’s not that good. Sure it’s fine if you want to read the latest entry, but beyond that it really serves no purpose.
While planning out the next design, using the current design has taught me a couple of things that I know won’t be making it into the next one and have helped me think of new ideas that probably would have never occurred if I hadn’t tried the site out myself. So if you own a site, why don’t you go about using it for the rest of the week. Followup on comments if you have them, go looking for old content and just see where the site takes you. Does the actual design make you want to tear your hair out after 15 minutes on the site?
Have a go at it, you might find that the food doesn’t taste that good.
Internets is playing a big and very important role in our lives and also providing us more affordable opportunities of the internet marketing due to the great competition in the industry and because of this web hosting packages are now also cheap then before. Even more then less hosting companies are offering you the free domain registration with their hosting packages and also providing security software packages to secure your online data. You can find lots of companies on the internet that are providing dependable and affordable VoIP service to their clients. Internet service providers ISP are mostly using the wireless internet technologies to get faster.
As I mentioned yesterday I’m in the planning stages for redesigns on all the properties that I am a part of. These involve:
What I am finding interesting is that when I think of the personalities that we are trying to portray on these sites not all the designs seem to match. I think 9rules fits perfectly with what we are trying to achieve. It’s great content, with a laid-back feel to it. We want anyone to feel as though they can post a Note without worrying about stepping into the realm of geniuses, but we also want them to have faith in the fact that we have selected the best sites across the web to guide them towards.
Wisdump is sort of in the middle. The site is mostly seriously topics, with a bit of a crazy spin on things, but I do think it could have a more personal feel behind it while still retaining its professionalism.
Oreo CEO I love. I have a new project coming out in 2007 so some minor changes need to be done, but the personality of the site matches exactly what I want to convey.
ScrivsTyme is not even close to the personality that Tyme and I have on the show. You have a serious looking site, with two people who have nothing but fun. Definitely needs an overhaul.
I think a lot of site owners would have a problem answering the question of what their site’s personality is though. Everyone wants professional, but doesn’t understand that professional comes in many forms. Nobody ever seems to ask for polished or playful and if they do they probably don’t think they can get them both at the same time.
If one of your selling points is that you provide a wonderful community for people, then shouldn’t the site have a community feel to it or should it feel as though you just walked into a corporate boardroom? Slashdot’s design has always matched the community behind it I feel. An elitist type of personality to match the geek crowd where everyone thinks they are right.
I used Apple in a post yesterday and I get to use them again today. Don’t you think their site matches their personality? Clean design. Easy to use. Fun.
A final example that comes to mind is the New York Times. The design just fits the personality of the paper.
I know it might seem like a silly question but ask yourself does your site match the personality that you are trying to show your audience? Do you wear daisy dukes and flip flops on your first date or a suit and tie to the beach?
Nicholas Carr has never been one to shy away from voicing his opinion and although his arguments sound good, many times I find myself disagreeing with him because he always seems to be a bit disconnected from the rest of the Web. One of his latest posts titled, Welcome Web 3.0, talks about his relief to know that Web 2.0 is out the door and Web 3.0 is being ushered in. Hold up now, I’m not one to get into what makes something Web 2.0 or not, but to be grateful that it is on the way out just so we can start talking about something new is jumping the gun a bit.
If the Web has been around since ‘94 (give or take a year) and Web 2.0 “started” in 2004 (I know this can be argued, but whatever) then only two years later we are all ready for the next phase of the web? Sure if you have been talking about Web 2.0 for the last year then you are probably getting tired of seeing the same websites copy the same websites and in your opinion nothing innovated is coming out anymore, but just because you are ready to see something new doesn’t mean the other 99% are ready for that leap.
How many everyday people do you know use Web 2.0 sites? How many people are thrilled with the potential of tagging or even bother to see what’s hot in the blogosphere by checking Technorati? How many everyday people feel that if a site doesn’t have a RSS feed then it serves no purpose to them?
How many sites have more users than Yahoo or MySpace, which are both considered to be Web 1.0 sites? Sure some sites might be ready for Web 3.0 and whatever the hell it is supposed to bring, but you need users to actually know and understand what is going on for it to be useful. The semantic web, the web we all have been dreaming for simply doesn’t make itself and in all honesty 99.99999% of the sites out there are not ready for it yet either.
Sure it sounds great that we will be able to type in a question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.” and get the exact result we are looking for, but is it really needed yet? Especially when we still have so many problems still to tackle in this phase of the web? This is the Web that Tim Berners-Lee thought of over a decade ago, but we certainly weren’t in any rush then so I don’t think our impatience of talking about the same stuff should lead us to believe that we need to usher in the not so near future now.
I know that none of us that write on these crazy blogs think like the normal people think (they are weird aren’t they?), but what makes us believe that we are the ones to dictate where the world is going when none of us have created a site that even 5% of the web’s population has used (that would be around 50M users for all those calculating at home). We are stuck in our own echo chamber so when sites such as ReviewMe offer to pay you to write about them, we see 20 of our favorite sites doing so and all of a sudden get sick with the web, but also forget that there is so much more beyond those sites. I’m still enjoying the current phase of the web and believe that I have a lot more to learn so I’m in no rush to go anywhere.
Web 2.0 is too much fun.
More on what makes Web 3.0 great can be seen in the New York Times article Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense. Kottke believes you deserve an eye-poke just for saying “Web 3.0″. I’m down with that.
In Jeff Croft’s entry, Five things I’m doing to get better at web design, I came across an excellent point that I know we are going to be doing more of in the future of 9rules and that is designing pages and not templates. Jeff stats
Somewhat relatedly, I often find myself lamenting the fact that web sites are so incredibly templated. On most sites, nearly every page uses the same basic layout. We rarely design pages — we design templates. Those templates then get applied to lots of pages. On most sites, this is necessary for practical purposes. I find it limiting. When we run a feature in Sunday’s paper and it’s got a beautifully done custom layout that totally fits the story, and then I see that online it’s running in the same template as everything else, it really makes me want to cry.
Now this doesn’t mean that every single page we create (ex. blog entry) needs to have a custom layout, but whenever a new section of your site is being planned think can it be better served with a different layout. Yes, this might challenge the brain a bit more, but I find that being challenged when it comes to IA and design is when the real fun begins. However, don’t create new layouts just to create new layouts.
When I think of sites that take it upon themselves to practice this method the first site that comes to mind is Apple. Take a look at these pages:
No two are alike yet they all represent Apple products and all are within the Apple domain. What’s interesting though is that they actually serve a purpose and don’t break the flow of the site. They aren’t different just to be different. They are different because they each contain different types of information and therefore didn’t layouts work for each one.
Now I wouldn’t get too excited and try to figure out new ways to go about designing your blog because blogs aren’t deep enough in my opinion to warrant 3-4 separate layouts for pages. However, if your blog is more of a website (I know these terms start to get confusing) then sure have a go at examining each page and figuring out what works best for it.
I’m in the planning stages for a redesign of this site, which I don’t plan to get done till 2007, but that doesn’t mean the current site can’t handle a couple of tweaks. While reading the excellent article, Web Design is 95% Typography II, I noticed that Oliver included a link to Wisdump which affectionately states what more than a handful of people have said about the site.
Scrivs, you are without no doubt the dude 2.0 - and your company does amazing stuff, but what were you thinking when you downscaled the font size on wisdump? I know that I can scale it up with a simple key combination, but I don’t want to. I used to read wisdump (ex whitespace) weekly. I don’t read it anymore because I am too lazy to adjust the font size.
That’s all I needed to hear so what did I do? I looked at his stylesheet and stole his font code so now we are back to being able to read the site without feeling that every paragraph is a footnote. There are a lot more little fixes to do with this current version, but for now I hope this brings one or two people back.
You people should have scolded me more. Please forgive me.
Digg has become popular over time because of the democratic system it employs. Anybody can post a story and have a chance of it making the frontpage. The latest controversy surrounding the site though is that the system can be gamed (no surprise there). If a group of people work together they can easily get a link to the frontpage and therefore some people (including the Digg people) believe this takes away from the democratic nature of the site, when in fact this is exactly what should be happening.
Not too long ago, people were complaining that a small group of Wikipedia editors had too much power with regards to what content made it onto the site or not. A Democratic system does not mean that everyone is on a level playing field, but does leave open the fact that if done correctly any person has an opportunity to control the system just like the current crop of elites.
The real concern here is when you try to prevent individuals from “gaming” your system are you really helping or hurting your site. In the case of Digg you could argue your case either way. It’s easy to see how a small group (top 100) have heavy influence over whether a link makes it on the homepage or not, but does that deter quality content from making it? They had to become top 100 users one way or another because it just doesn’t magically happen. If you try to take away the “power” that they worked so hard to achieve you are more than likely going to upset them and quite possibly get them to leave (make sure to checkout The Overjustification Effect and User Generated Content).
Sure another group will just take their place, but what is to assure you that the new group won’t do the same thing? I tend to believe that these groups bring order to chaos and essentially that’s exactly what you want. You have to understand that in this kind of participatory media, some groups are going to participate a lot more than others. Not everyone is going to put the same amount of time into a site as the next person. In the U.S. political system (supposedly democratic in nature), when two candidates are running for the same position, the one that gets his name out the best tends to win the election. They are gaming a system that we believe shouldn’t be gamed.
Scott Karp makes an excellent point about Digg and gaming when he examines the same situation.
If participatory media is all about community and the user in control, it’s not surprising that Digg is having so many problems taking a traditional command and control approach to addressing abuse of the system. You have to wonder why Kevin Rose didn’t just come out and ask the “community” how to solve the problem. When you put the users in control, you can’t suddenly decide that they have too much control and take it away from them.
The current 9rules model doesn’t allow for gaming of the system since the sites that get in are decided by only three people. Well actually, that isn’t entirely true. You might get on our good side and have a better chance of getting in than if you piss us off and in many cases you could consider that gaming the system. If we were to open up the selection process for 9rules Member selection a small group of people might go out of their way to find how to game the system, but this shouldn’t lessen the quality of the process. When you give individuals unspecified power, it is up to them to define how they will use it and that’s the beauty of these democratic systems.
TechCrunch head honcho, Mike Arrington, has made it no secret that he is gunning for CNet with the creation of his own blog network. It’s kind of weird to go after the old guard, but I’m guessing that Arrington is more interested in CNet type numbers for his site than CNet type of respect.
It doesn’t seem that CNet though is going to sit still and let these fancy “independent” blogs take all their glory. With the launch of Webware, CNet has introduced themselves into the blogging game. Now they have had blogs on their main site for a long time and CNet is already a network of sites, but by creating an individual site that works like a blog they are able to publish fast and often, helping them to keep up with the competition.
With the larger publication sites, the problem has never been of quality or their ability to grab exclusives, the problem has been speed. Today’s readers love information overload because RSS and other technologies allow them to quickly view an entry and move on if they wish without being bothered by going to the site and reading an article in detail. Because of this they might not mind that a site has 8-10 entries a day because they know they can get a quick synopsis of them and choose which ones to spend their time on.
If you publish on CNet you can’t avoid having to push your articles through an editor and therefore slowing down the publishing process, but on blogs you essentially become your own editor and so you decided when to publish. By creating Webware, CNet extends their “trusted” brand to an external site that allows for quick publishing and discussion…
Discussion.
This is kind of where the problems start to kick in and CNet was doing so well with this concept. I wanted to post a comment on this entry giving them props for producing a quality and entertaining video. However, to do so requires “free” registration just to get my words published and a discussion started. Not gonna happen from me considering I might only post a comment there once every 8 months. Now have a look at the actual comment page and see if it inspires you to register just to join the thrilling discussion.
The quality of the writing on the site is good. The video was a high-amateur quality (a good thing) due to the resources that CNet has, but missing the basics of how discussions get going on a blog site really is a negative for them. I think any large site has the ability to create a blog and do some real damage, if they learn that they can’t always do things their way. As long as they keep thinking like this Arrington will always have a shot at the big time. Not like he is hurting now anyways though.
