Dynamic tension can be a good thing. There are plenty of examples of when this is so, but online publishing isn’t one of them. Publishing's plunging transaction costs and its increasingly
desperate attempts to shore up some sort of sustainable revenue model are creating a tug-of-war that’s threatening to tear apart the one person this whole sorry mess is revolving around: the
reader. Somebody had better get their act together soon, because I’m one reader that’s getting sick of it.
Trying to read an article on most sites online is like trying to tiptoe
through a cognitive minefield. Publishers have squeezed every possible advertising opportunity onto the page -- and in doing so, have sacrificed credibility, cohesiveness and clarity. The job of
publishing is communication, but these publishers seem to think the job is actually sacrificing communication for revenue. Methinks if you have to attack your own business model to make a profit, you
should be taking a long, hard look at said model.
advertisement
advertisement
Either Fish or Cut Click Bait
The problem has grown so pervasive that academia is even piling on. In the past few months, a
number of studies have looked at the dismal state of online publishing.
In the quest for page views, publishers have mastered the trick of pushing our subconscious BSO (Bright Shiny Object)
buttons with clickbait. Clickbait is essentially brain porn -- headlines, often misleading -- that you can’t resist clicking on. The theory is more page views equal more advertising
opportunities. The problem is that clickbait essential derails the mind from its predetermined focus. And worse, clickbait often distracts the brain with a misleading headline the subsequent article
fails to deliver on. As Jon Stewart recently told New York magazine,
“It’s like carnival barkers, and they all sit out there and go, 'Come on in here and see a three-legged man!' So you walk in and it’s a guy with a crutch.”
A recent study from The Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that misleading headlines
and something called “false balance” -- where publishers give equal airtime to sources with very different levels of credibility -- can negatively affect the reader’s ability
to remember the story and cognitively process the information. In other words, publishers' desperate desire to grab eyeballs gets in the way of their ability to communicate effectively.
Buzzfeed Editor in Chief Ben Smith has publicly gone on the record about why he
doesn’t use click-bait headlines: “Here is a trade secret I’d decided a few years ago we’d be better off not revealing — clickbait stopped working around 2009.” He
references Facebook engineer Khalid El-Arini in the post, saying “readers don’t want to be
tricked by headlines; instead, they want to be informed by them.”
Now You Read Me, Now You Don’t
If you ever wanted to test your resolve, try getting
to the end of an online article. What content there is is shoehorned into a format littered with ads and clickbait of every description. Many publishers even try to squeeze revenue from the content
itself by using Text Enhance, an ad-serving platform that hyperlinks keywords in the copy and shows ads if your cursor strays anywhere near these links. I often use my cursor both as a place marker
and a quick way to vet sources of embedded links. Text Enhance makes reading in this way an incredibly frustrating experience, as it continually pops up poorly targeted ads while I try to tiptoe
through the advertising landmines to piece together what the writer was originally trying to say. It turns reading content into a virtual game of “Whack-a-Mole.”
Of course, this is assuming you’ve made it past the page takeover and auto-play video ads that
litter the “mind-field” between you and the content you want to access on a site like Forbes or The Atlantic. These interruptions in our intent create a negative mental framework
compounded by having to weave through increasingly garish ad formats in order to piece together the content you're trying to access.
A new study from Microsoft and Northwestern University shows that aggressive and annoying advertising
may prop up short-term revenues, but at a long-term price that publishers should be thinking twice about paying. According to the study, “The practice of running annoying ads can cost more money
than it earns, as people are more likely to abandon sites on which they are present. In addition, in the presence of annoying ads, people were less accurate in remembering what they had read. None of
these effects on users is desirable from the publisher’s perspective.”
Again, we have this recurring theme about revenue getting in the way of user experience. This is a conflict
from which there can be no long-term benefit. When you frustrate users, you slowly kill your revenue source. You engage in a vicious cycle from which there is no escape.
I understand that
online publishers are desperate. I get that. They should be. I suspect the ad-supported business platform they’re trying to prop up is hopelessly damaged. Another will emerge to take its place.
But the more they frustrate us, the faster that will happen.