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3-Minute Roast, Vol. 2, No. 5

A Poke in the Eye of the Online/Multimedia Industrial Complex

[scientifically tested to take no more than 3 minutes to read, unless you're shopping for Christmas presents online while reading]

3MR Expose: A Fly on the Wall of a Failing Webzine

Online magazines seemed like a no-brainer when they were first conceived back in 1994. No costs for printing, circulation, distribution. Layout and copyediting could be done onscreen. Newspapers and magazines would soon become obsolete dinosaurs.
A funny thing happened on the way to e-zine popularity: bloated staffs, stupidly slow production schedules, along with eye strain and no portability for readers. To top it all off, the people running the most high-profile zines (see DeathRace 2000, below) seem to have no clue how to make money.
We were curious what went on at an editorial meeting of one of the high-fliers, so we enlisted 3MR staffer Lefty Periwinkle to bug one of their offices during a crucial meeting. Periwinkle's experience "remodeling" the Russian consulate in San Francisco came in handy. Here's a rough transcript of the meeting; we figured out job titles by using sophisticated voice analysis techniques. Those with the least stress due to stock options cashed were probably higher up...

Producer-in-Chief: What we really need are more hits. Any ideas?

Hit Producer: I can register us for more search engines, so their Web robots drive our hit count up. Or just send a few of our own hit-boost-bots through the site...

Associate Producer: Let's try to split up features into more pages. If we do a story with "98 Tips on Windows 98," the story should be 98 pages.

Assistant Producer: What reader would click through that many pages? We should be more selective on what we break out. Contact information, the best tips, the concluding sentence, perhaps? Something like: "and out of all the tips we got, this one was the most amazing..." then they click to see one sentence explaining part of the tip...then they click to see another part of the tip...and so on. Specialized clickthroughs.

Focus Group Specialist: Our latest surveys show that readers want pages that download faster with less clickthroughs.

Producer-in-Law: Yeah, let's not concentrate on pages turned. Hits are good, but we need to offer more than that for advertisers. We need animated banners that run at the top of pages, and also at the bottom, the sides, and maybe within the stories themselves. Readers understand these are necessary and won't mind.

Vice Producer: Better yet, let's speed up the time a banner ad would load onto a page, while having the text take much longer. That way the ad would be in the reader's face while they wait. Guarantee the advertiser 20 seconds of face-time without editorial getting in the way.

Focus Group Specialist: Readers are getting fed up with so many ads! They don't know what's editorial and what's advertising.

Producer-in-Chief: So true. Why not eliminate banners and try for more tie-ins and sponsorships. People love our "Steve Jobs" Listings, the Microsoft Legal Advice column, and the Softbank Expo Conference Calendar.

Sponsorship Producer: Well, I have a list of books we should review from our online bookstore partner. And a list of relevant music CDs from our online CD store partner. And a few software review ideas from the good folks who are hosting our site.

Producer-in-Chief: Are we getting paid by our partners depending on the books and CDs sold? Maybe we can offer package deals to our readers if they make it through 98-page stories?

Focus Group Specialist: Our surveys do show that readers like getting good deals.

At this point, our bug's batteries ran out, so we're unsure if the producers ever talked about the actual editorial they were running.

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DeathRace 2000(tm)

[Each week, we'll highlight the lowlights among three online ventures that are struggling: Slate, HotWired, and Snap!]

Desperate Slate Thinks Subscriptions are the Answer

Like a child that never learns, Slate is bringing back the notion that readers should subscribe to their e-zine. Though publisher Rogers Weed swore on a stack of bibles that they would start charging in January 1997, it never happened. Now Weed contends that with 140,000 readers, charging is feasible. Maybe this is an indirect way for Microsoft to pay its mounting legal bills. More likely, it's a desperation move for an online magazine that thinks "in the black" is getting a more ethnically diverse readership.

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"3-Minute Roast" is a weekly, advertisement-free, opinionated rip on anything that strikes our fancy in the online world.

Max Schlickting - Editor-in-Chief
Barbara Yalpsid - Online Editor
Lefty Periwinkle - First Amendment Expert

* If you hate our rantings, send a reply message: "Eavesdropping is wrong, especially if
you don't hear anything dirty" and we'll discontinue service.
* To see all our back issues, link up to 3MR on the Web at:
http://www.mediawhore.com/3-minute/roastarchive.html
* The material is the exclusive copyright of PETWeZE, People for the Ethical Treatment
of WebZine Employees, fighting for the right to stuff the hit-count ballot box.
* Feel free to forward this to three friends or enemies. Some
call it a pyramid scheme; we call it distribution.


This e-newsletter is copyright 1997 Mark Glaser

 

If you have comments or suggestions, email glaze@sprintmail.com
 



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