The Value of Content

https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/the-value-of-content-a30bbe8b54a5

by jamesknelson • 11 years ago

49 31 11 years ago

The biggest challlenge on any measurement is to be sure that you're really measuring a good proxy of the relevant information. Too often metrics are driven on misleading numbers...

Mithaldu• 11 years ago

Surely there must be more like me? People who appreciate that somebody, somewhere is putting craft and effort into creating something, and that these people need to get paid if we want that to continue?

They exist and made https://www.patreon.com/ where artists can sign up to make donation accounts that either work on a per-time or per-work basis, and people can donate whatever amount they like, and optionally get rewards defined by the artist for certain donation levels.

Here's an example of a magazine using it for funding:

https://www.patreon.com/TheVitaLounge

mooreds2• 11 years ago

I am a Patreon. Was a pretty painless process, now I support a podcast that means a lot to me, for a few bucks a month. It really is set and forget.

Seems like a great way to garner support from your community, in an ongoing fashion, as opposed to kickstarter.

mirimir• 11 years ago

I don't see that they accept Bitcoin.

Too bad :(

Sir_Substance• 11 years ago

Surely there must be more like me? People who appreciate that somebody, somewhere is putting craft and effort into creating something, and that these people need to get paid if we want that to continue?

I agree with you right up to the second comma.

Youtube was a smash success well before it started giving youtubers advertising money. Open source software has been around way longer than paypal donations. YMTD, Newgrounds and 4Chan have never paid their content creators. Stuff like the jargon file, zombocom, quakenet and OCAU has been around since forever, running on donations from users or the willing pockets of their creators. Wikipedia editors get paid in warm fuzzies.

People are basically creative and giving, and like making content for others to enjoy. The internet was hardly languishing from a lack of content before advertising started to seriously make inroads.

Hell, when it comes to technical advice, half the best content is technical posts made before 2006 on random forums all across the internet by people who just want to be helpful. No forums user has ever gone "I'd like to post a full teardown of my favorate motorbike engine, but no one will pay me so I guess that the opportunity cost would be wasted, maybe I'll go spend 5 hours on mechanical turk instead".

On the other hand, sites like wired, forbes, the wall street journal and time have spiraled into a cesspool of clickbait titles, poorly researched articles and thinly veiled native advertising pieces since they moved their business models from mostly paper mags to mostly online advertising.

I reject utterly the notion that the web is improved by paying people to make internet-centric content, and would shed no tears whatsoever if I saw all monitisation-driven content creators leave the web for whatever they feel are greener pastures.

omalleyt• 11 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly and also want to point out that people who regularly produce great content can usually capitalize on their audience through other means that don't directly monetize the content. Obviously speaking engagements, hardcopy book sales, and other offerings related to the content you've produced. Content is too general a term to be very specific here.

SolaceQuantum• 11 years ago

Patreon does have some problems; a person can pledge a lot of money and then back out of their pledge after the content is delivered which is kind of shitty but is done often enough that I know several patreon artists that resort to delaying their outputs over the next cycle or w/e to assure they get the pledged money.

mooreds2• 11 years ago

Note that the post is from 2013.

eterm• 11 years ago

which makes the quote "Medium gives so much care and attention to your content that almost anything on there automatically feels of value." more important, because I clicked the Medium link and was presented by exactly this dark pattern.

drcongo7• 11 years ago

Author of the post here. Thanks for posting it, it's little out of date in terms of the references in there but I stand by the sentiment.

Since I wrote the article I feel like I've seen something of a drop in usage of the kinds of techniques described, total anecdata though.

Patreon posted below looks very interesting. Thanks for the heads up.

ggillas• 11 years ago

If you could update the references, who's doing it right today?

drcongo7• 11 years ago

I wish I could remember some of the good ones I've found, and I wish I'd started collecting screenshots of them and done a tumblr in support of their efforts.

jasode3• 11 years ago

From your article, you wrote:

If you want the whole story here you should also be sat in a room testing this modal overlay with real people. Ask them questions:

“Do you like that overlay..." [...] It’s extremely unlikely that they like it.

Your opinion may ultimately be correct but your justification for it is flawed.

If you survey people, you get what's called a "stated preference." (SP) [1]

However, there's another concept called a "revealed preference" (RP) [2] and this often contradicts the "stated preference."

The web analytics Ramit Sethi believed in may also be flawed. However, the point is that statistics collection attempts to uncover "revealed preferences". Since RP is often hidden, the tools for uncovering it are not surveys. Instead, they use hidden cameras, or Point-Of-Sales transaction data, or eye tracking, or web analytics, etc.

There are many examples where RP yields more insight than SP. This is counterintuitive so we end up thinking SP is the correct perspective because it "feels right." Many real world examples have proven SP to be incorrect such as retail sales events, airlines, dating & romance, etc. I can expand those examples, or you can search google if you're curious about them. Annoying ad overlays on web content may be another area where RP trumps SP. I haven't researched it enough to know.

Your article gives more weight to SP than RP with no justification why it should.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice_modelling#Stated_prefer...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference

calinet62• 11 years ago

Okay, I challenge you to discover a "revealed preference" that says they like overlays. Not that they click them, not that it "results in an action," but that they like them and they will be more likely to return to the site because of the positive and enjoyable experience of the popup.

There are a few dozen confounding variables in your analysis as well if you want to look for the revealed preference. Why are users clicking the modals? Are they certain that they have a choice? In the article, the author makes the excellent point that many people believe that they must complete the modal to continue reading the article. That's not preference, that's coercion.

So, sure, it's valuable to understand revealed preferences without bias of leading questions. Absolutely. But you still have to keep your head on and understand the variables you're measuring, the confounding variables, and larger effects at play.

This question comes up a lot in user experience design, with stated preference vs. revealed preference (how you do user testing and surveying vs. how users actually use the product unprompted), and the larger macro-scale question of what actually makes a quality experience. Often making all the decisions about the user experience from microinteraction tests leads to a poor overall experience, and it's exactly because of too much focus on 'what works' without understanding how the measurements are being made and how we should interpret that data.

anthnguyen94• 11 years ago

I think the neat thing about Medium is that it has the Facebook style validation. Surely, you're more careful about what you say on Facebook because your name and profile is attached to everything you post. Medium is the same. The focus is on you, author is you, no handles, or anything. Makes it a lot less likely for you to post some garbage clickbait.

pjc50• 11 years ago

Makes it a lot less likely for you to post some garbage clickbait.

Hardly. Buzzfeed, the epitome of clickbait, has author bylines. As does the Daily Mail. Some of the best blogs I've ever read have been anonymous, and the famously high-quality Economist has no bylines. The thing that makes people less likely to post clickbait on Medium is that there are no adverts to pay them for clicks.

jotm2• 11 years ago

The post is pretty relevant even today - I'm seeing more popups and slideouts and other s^&t now than ever :-).

However, it's a fact that they lead to more conversions, more signups and more sales.

It's pretty useless to complain about them - if the publisher's goal is to drive sales using content that will never be seen, that's their prerogative. If the readers don't like the popups, they can just say TC;DR and leave the site forever. Or use ad blockers (which publishers hate, for obvious reasons).

In the long run, analytics will show that drop in view numbers.

valisystem• 11 years ago

However, it's a fact that they lead to more conversions, more signups and more sales.

I wouldn't jump to conclusions. Maybe you have expertise on this, I don't, but I've seen nothing that could make me lay a definitive conclusion like this.

The article incision is on the fact that some people needs analytics to back up evaluation of the web site trying to know if it's doing good or not, regardless of revenue. So you end up to those techniques that drives irrelevant numbers up, that can even damage potential revenue, but it's ok, you're doing the right things, look at those good numbers. You can't test such things with A/B testing or anything else, it's long term relationship with the audience, and those analytics are not measuring this.

jotm2• 11 years ago

Yeah, I'm only talking about small niche websites aimed at ranking in Google and/or Facebook and driving leads/sales. Various pop-ups and free offers work very well.

I'm pretty sure they don't work on tech-savvy people and for large blogs where the audience matters more than monetization.

SandersAK• 11 years ago

We at Beacon (beaconreader.com) agree.

We've focused on this for the past 18 months and have helped journalists and publishers get more than $1m in funding for quality journalism projects.

I wrote about this as well a while back: http://www.beaconreader.com/blog/the-reader-writer-relations...

Hit me up if you wanna chat: adrian at beaconreader.com

drcongo7• 11 years ago

Beacon looks like a fantastic project, thanks for the heads up.

jordanpg2• 11 years ago

I agree with the sentiment. Off-topic suggestion, though.

Want people to value your "content"? Consider abandoning the word "content" forever.

Those same people analytics people you deride use it in their spreadsheets.

Words matter, and the word "content" is about as icy and evocative of technical, corporate fetters as "enterprise solutions" to me.

drcongo7• 11 years ago

Of the 95k odd people who have read the article on Medium, nobody has ever before mentioned a dislike of the word content. As much as I'd love to, it's hardly practical to cater to the tastes of each 0.001053%

jordanpg2• 11 years ago

Well, I suppose the question is what do you think about the word?

I'm saying that if I wrote anything that I felt was worth reading and posted it to the internet, that I would never call it content. I'm saying that, to me, that word connotes a certain type of writing: the type you find on colorful sites with lots of ads, whether benign in the sense you talk about or not. Reference material, if worth looking at, at all.

I'm not asking you to cater to my tastes, and we're on the same side as far as the article goes. I'm just telling you what that word has come to mean to me in the year 2015.

The Value of Content

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