Jon Alper's probably insufficiently humble opinion

Carleen Hawn wrote this piece at Paid Content and Leo Klien followed up with this one commenting on a talk I gave at Macworld Expo.  Now, I really don’t take issue with either commenting with some negativity on a public speech I made and how I answered a question from the floor especially when, as is often the case, my answer included “I don’t know.” (As always, I tried to to offer,  some core advice and provocation for further thought)

Questions about opinion from an audience member at a conference are usually very tough to answer as a speaker because often one is there while either representing an employer or client or, at the least, is bound by the policies of that client or employer. More importantly though for this particular question is that having an opinion of any certainty really needs a lot more facts and exploration than one can get in a ‘once back and forth’ from a podium. That is unless you’re a politician hammering the talking points.

I spoke at Macworld Expo a lot. I probably will again. I truly loved doing it. Great audiences and some very smart questions. Good friends and lots to learn. I’ll be honest, I can’t remember now which session this was but theirs, Carleens and Leo’s, was an interesting response that I couldn’t react to at the time because of how conservatively I chose to interpret editorial policy at my former employer.

Now, of course, absent those issues, if somebody were to ask my opinion of a simpler and more black and white  issue, it wouldn’t be difficult at all for me to pontificate. It comes to me naturally. 😉 This was a much more complicated question than, for example, “IIS or Apache?”.

So, now that I am blessed with the freedom to respond more fully, here goes:

I don’t actually  disagree with the conclusions they drew in a general sense. Leo Klein’s being embodied in his headline: “Follow Your Users (Because they sure as Hell Aren’t Going to Follow You)” and Carleen Hawn’s being “But isn’t the idea of New Media to leverage as many entities as possible?” and also that she believed I meant to say all content should be free.

What I will say is that both reactions lack important nuances. Being fair to both Carleen and Leo, they wrote much shorter pieces than this one and hadn’t the space for nuance. More to the point, I couldn’t give them much to go on either. Perils of the context. I would welcome further dialog.

First, ‘follow your users’.  It’s a great theory and sometimes very good practice. The problem is that’s usually much more complicated than it can seem at first blush. There’s a pervasive belief among those of marketing sensibilities that, for example, YouTube users are an ‘audience’ like the ‘7PM Tuesday Nights’ television viewers could be described as an ‘audience’. YouTube’s users are hardly as easy to pin down demographically speaking as 1980’s prime time television viewers are, or even Huffington Post readers are now. You can use whatever metrics research reveals (including that Google are still losing their shirts running YouTube 😉 ) and, now,you can even Google’s metrics reporting on your own videos.  Much harder to get are metrics about how else those views worked for your brand. The internet changed the rules. Media producers can’t deduce socio-economic data from the addresses of their subscribers (they can geo-locate IP addresses but that’s both more and less information than a magazine subscription delivered to a dentist’s office). ‘Television’ producers don’t have day-part, prime time, broadcast area and what shows precede or follow theirs ‘on air. Advertisers have successfully bludgeoned online media producers into accepting a standard of click-thru rate after decades of being able to sell impressions in the form of column inches and spots. Your shows don’t get ‘sold’ into syndication on UHF. Now, success must be measured by how much passion users have for your content and how connected to, or even aware of your your brand they are. If they have a passion, they’ll buy services or products from you. If they are aware of your brand, you can make some sort of case to potential advertisers to pay more than throw-away basic CPM rates.

The tricky part is that, if you’re not a believer in ‘all content should be free’ and you’re not blessed with endless resources and able not to care if you go broke making content, then you need to figure out how to monetize your content.

I’ll pause here and respond to that aspect of Carleen’s article: “I take by this, that he means the point of view that content can and should be free”

I don’t actually believe all content should be free. I do think you need to recognize the changes to the business of media that the web has caused and react and adapt.

I will say, and this may have contributed to her interpretation of what I said at the conference; I  have always believed all Public Broadcasting content should be free. That’s a personal philosophical position driven by a passion for the social importance of independent publicly funded media and the pragmatic view that we, American taxpayers, have already paid for it once. Paid for it, in part, with tax money, that most (all?) public broadcasters are non-profits and tax exempt themselves, that they also receive less obvious public funding sources like spectrum allocation and must carry as well as not-specifically-targeted-for-broadcasting public money like NEA and NSF grants.  I also happen to think, we should pay more for Public Broadcasting with legal carve-outs for rights and ‘full’ public funding to ensure it can again be unfettered by any need (real or imagined) to ‘compete’ with commercial media on the same playing field but that’s a topic for another day….

However, most content producers aren’t publicly funded and, the fact is, I don’t believe any force should impose ‘free’ on their hard work the same way as it should on publicly funded material. So….

It is true that while I don’t like, or believe current paywall strategies are or will be successful , Free (as in Beer) content doesn’t have to be free as in “creators can’t make money off it.”

A smart strategy for making money off media is to deliver value you can either sell advertising against, or have added value products you sell using the ‘free’ stuff as a loss-leader. Now, there’s a lot more writing to be done here about what that means and how to do it but for now, I hope it’s clear that there is a divergence in my opinion about what publicly funded media should be and what commercial media should be, and that getting into this whole aspect tangled up in the question at the time wasn’t an option for me while employed by a public broadcaster and speaking at a conference.

So, back to the idea of ‘following your users’. I don’t recall whether the questioner self-identified as a Journalism School teacher but, presumably they did for Carleen to report it. My response, and damn I love the rare occasions when I can manage pithy, was; “When your MySpace page gets more traffic than your company’s website that is a Capital ‘B’ bad thing”.

That is the core of the matter. If your efforts to reach out to new audiences accrues to your traffic and your identity online then you’re doing it right. If you are ‘syndicating’ yourself into irrelevance then you haven’t a prayer of monetizing your content. I wrote a piece about how Daring Fireball does some very slick things to keep touch with their audience here and I have Tweet This running here to help my readers post their interest in what I write to Twitter and Facebook. I also have an RSS feed running summaries of the articles. I’ve even piggy-backed on YouTube’s bandwidth to embed videos but linked back to the site of the artist and their iTunes store.  That band hosts a free download of one song on their website and links to their iTunes store. Loss leader.

The reality is there are forces akin to gravity; user expectations, anonymity , ‘piracy’ and ever more easy to use technology that will try to make content ‘free as in beer’ but that doesn’t mean, at all, that creators of quality content can’t or shouldn’t monetize their content.

What’s going wrong for so many content creators is that they so often utterly fail to recognize and work with those forces. An example, ironically, of how they fail is that, because of when the question was asked, the topic was the now fading away  MySpace. Any investment the a content producer made in a presence on MySpace is now of significantly diminished value. If they succeeded in exploiting MySpace and driving traffic to their own canonical presence? Great! If, as is usually the case, they diluted their brand and furthered the fragmentation of their audience, then they not only spent money trying to reach a shrinking audience, they undermined themselves in the process in such a way that they’ll have an even harder time recovering that audience then, not great. The same risks, by the way, apply to investing in Facebook and Twitter, todays ‘growth’ audiences, because something else will be along any minute. MySpace as a gathering space for musicians and music fans is, for example, up against the wall from this: Ping.

A person very dear to me who I have enormous respect for invested a measured amount to promote her brand on MySpace. In this case, it was an old, highly regarded and venerable brand. I told her that promoting the brand on MySpace was like dressing it up in clear high heels. Perhaps a bit harsh I’ll admit but the reality is that for many places one might follow one’s users, establishing a presence there can dilute your brand. Is this a brand that would be enriched by MySpace Ettinger of London? Do you really want your brand and your content everywhere? Are MySpace users really your users? Heck, and this is an even more complicated question, are the people who may be your users, in a mode at MySpace that will feel appropriate for them to see you there? Does the kid discussing the newest release from Lady Gaga really want their friends to see them showing an interest in the the Times’ Best Seller list? Perhaps they want to be in the closet about their inner bookworm when hanging out with the cool kids on MySpace.

So, while there’s a lot more to be said on these issues, and that’s a large portion of the goals of this site, the answer to the question I’d offer that J-School teacher now would be:

‘I think you need to recognize the differences between how your students would use a MySpace and a blog at your official school site. Understand that the social interactions one would have on a personal level on MySpace are and should be different for them as individuals and them as aspiring professionals. Frankly, if I were you, I would encourage those students to keep their personal and social interactions off your official school site to preserve your brand.  I’d encourage them to consider that any articles, columns and opinion pieces they wrote and posted to your official site would accrue to their brand by association with your school. I’d explain that their presence on social networks could, in fact, impact their careers. I’d explain that there was an opportunity for them to be published under a nominal masthead that would benefit their image in the future and, I’d positively kill myself to work with the school’s IT department to make the experience as easy to use for the students, structured, discoverable and accessible and exposed to the public internet for search as possible. Finally, I would implement an editorial policy that established a balance between the need to build a critical mass of quality student work and giving those students the opportunity to express themselves. I’d make sure that whatever rights agreement your school made with the students was fair and reasonable and preserved their rights and the school’s. Hypothetically, license that becomes non-exclusive when they graduate.” Now, that advice is for the J-School professor who, presumably, had the business interests of the school in mind.  More content on their site, managed with a clear editorial policy accrues to their reputation. Being able to more successfully help their students launch their careers accrues to the students’ future ability to donate when the school later hits up the alums to buy a new wing for the dorms.

Now, what would I tell the J-school student who asked me the same question?

“You’re much better off posting your work to the J-School’s site and welcoming their editorial help to improve your work, if you can negotiate fair terms with them, than posting to MySpace. When you have had some success at the school’s site, you can and should host your own blog at your own domain. Oh, and if you’re hoping to be a journalist? Learn to be a Journalist, as in facts and sources, and a lack of personal opinion bias. When you get old, then you can do opinion pieces and you can blog on your own time.”

Carleen asks at the close of her piece: “So what’s wrong with posting everything  […] on MySpace and YouTube with a link to your home page?”

When you do, you dilute your brand. Your content is monetized by MySpace and YouTube. Your brand is diluted by their brand. Their UI, their video quality. Their technology choices. What content they decide is related to yours. That users can see how your content ‘ranks’ against the content that has been related to yours. What advertisers they sell views of your content to to promote themselves. If it’s a MySpace? The mere association is arguably brand-tarnishing for anything but the teen set. Every dollar you spend promoting your presence on MySpace, Facebook or anywhere but your own ‘home’ is just, well, gone.

In managing your presence online as a content producer, your first goal must always include increasing your audience’s perception of your value. That means, in large measure, your own site’s search engine rank and what other brands your content is associated with (to the limited extent that can be controlled at all) and you must always recognize that aggregators and social networking sites are in business to exploit other people’s content. That’s fine. That’s their business. Your job is to make it symbiotic rather than parasitic. Posting a whole piece with a link to your home page is hardly optimizing the possible value.

– Jon

A while ago I let rip with this bit of pith:

“I think we’d all be much better off if we started thinking of our personal info as currency and our opinions as monetizable content.” – Jon Alper

Today, I learned of any even pithier quote via: Petteri Hiisilä

“If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you are the product being sold.” – MetaFilter User: blue_beetle

UPDATE: Gruber Explains his method and identifies a pitfall: “What I didn’t foresee was the tremendous amount of software out there that does not properly parse non-ASCII characters in URLs, particularly IDN domain names.” In retrospect, I should have been more curious and tested his cagey domain name branding. It worked for me so I just assumed. I would have tested it had I implemented it but as a user, it worked, so what did I care? Anyway, Gruber explains more here: http://daringfireball.net/2010/09/starstruck

****UPDATE AGAIN 10.6.10**** http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2010/10/the-ly-domain-space-to-be-considered-unsafe/ Worth a read but I distill it thus:

Don’t rely on a business relationship where you don’t have the support of a legal system you can participate in. Obviously, we live in a global economy so what matters is the word ‘rely’. Participation != reliance.

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URL shorteners are extremely common tools used to make links shorter, more able to fit within artificially constrained text fields, and, in some cases, more human-readable. They can also have some other, arguably indirect, benefits in some cases including click-through tracking.

One major potential problem of course is link rot which can be a pretty staggering problem if your chosen provider completely folds up shop.

One common inducement to shorten URL’s is Twitter and the 140 character count limit on the ‘microblogging‘ site’s posts. While an argument can be made that imposing a 140 character limit enforces a tone, there’s no logical reason that Twitter couldn’t accept URLs shortened by the most basic method, an HTML embedded link:an HREF with your own descriptive text and probably claims disallowing this is a security advantage. Such a claim would ring hollow since URL shorteners themselves obfuscate the real target of a link in a way that’s actually potentially worse.

By now, some of the problems with these tools should be obvious:

• The provider of the translation from short to long can fold up shop instantly rotting all your links.
• The user can’t hover over the link and look in the status bar of their browser to see what the actual target is.
• Users seeing different shortened versions of the same link aren’t given the visual cue of ‘followed’ color change in their browser for links they have already seen.
• They do nothing to encourage site maintainers to strive for more accessible and better indexable and human-readable URL schemes.
• They insert yet another intermediary able to track users browsing habits.
• They are, in many cases, unnecessary layers of complexity.
• They can pose problems for content publishers wanting to be methodical about managing their own link rot. (Do you try to ‘fix’ expired shortened URLs? Can you when you don’t control them?)
• They have SEO implications.
• If you need to shorten URL’s on your intranet for, for example, easier tracking, you wouldn’t want to expose, or possibly couldn’t expose the URLs to a cloud based provider for security reasons.

So, let’s for the moment, set aside all the good reasons we should be hammering on Facebook, Twitter and others to exclude the characters used for posting HREFs and the links themselves from the character counts and accept, albeit grudgingly, that there could be good reasons to implement URL shortening mechanisms. How should we do it?

We should be hosting our own URL shortening mechanisms on our own sites.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball has this down to a science. If you follow Daring Fireball on Twitter you will notice every link he posts looks like this: http://✪df.ws/g4n These links are URLs he’s shortened on a server hosted in the .ws domain and they hit short tease pages on daringfireball.net in a directory called /linked. His little tease pages don’t always do the best job of telling the user what they’ll get with a click but this is part of Gruber’s editorial voice and is clearly done deliberately. The mechanics of the user experience, however, are extremely solid:

1. Shortened URL appears in Twitter feed. (or other microblogging site or method)
2. Shortened URL is uniquely branded as a Daring Fireball Link (issues with scaling his branding method notwithstanding)
3. User chooses to follow the link based on other content in the ‘tweet’
4. User is presented with a ‘tease page’ on Daring Fireball
5. User can, unless Gruber is being cute on his tease page, make an informed choice about whether to fully follow the link.
6. Gruber can track the response to the tweet, and, if he wanted to be a right bastard about it, outgoing clicks from his tease page could be sent through a click-through sever script.
7. Gruber can scan the contents of his Linked directory to manage link rot on his own site.
8. If he’s methodical about keeping track of which URLs he posts (and I bet he is), basic log analysis of referrers on requests to files in his /linked directory will tell him where he is picking up traffic. Some more complicated analytics could tell him some things about where people had propagated his links.

I happen to usually agree with Gruber, always enjoy reading his stuff and, frankly, take a certain vicarious pleasure in his occasional willingness to be a bit brash. I happen, also, to usually like the results, when he gets cute on his tease pages but, no matter what you think of Gruber and Daring Fireball, the method he uses is the basis of a really solid approach to managing a site and integration of that site with Twitter, Facebook and other mechanisms of ‘syndication’. It puts him back into a position where he is editorially engaging with his users on his own site after he used the visibility he got himself elsewhere.

It’s pretty slick and, done methodically with a transparent editorial policy, this approach could do a lot for fixing what’s wrong with the current willy nilly grabs for presence on Twitter, Facebook etc. by content companies who are now, almost always, just diluting their own brands. I happen to bristle a bit that Gruber’s hosting his URL shortener in a .ws domain (The country domain for Western Somoa and I think it’s because it was an easy way for him to register a domain branded with his UTF-8: E2 9C AA “✪” in his very short ‘✪df’ domain name but I don’t actually know why he chose .ws.) but that’s just my old school leanings when it comes to top level domains.

So, the solution, and maybe Gruber’s already built it, or maybe it’s one of these: 10 Free Scripts to Create Your Own Url Shortening Service is to host your own URL shortening mechanism on your own site. You can implement your shortened URL’s using the “The Full Gruber” and, with some good practices of your own, (mostly) mitigate every last one of the problems cited above except maybe some of the SEO issues.  Those  you could work around with other architecture and editorial choices and which would be offset by traffic to and the well organized placement of your tease pages.

No, of course, the Gruberization of link shortening practice isn’t nearly as clean, consistent and user-friendly as actual links direct to content with meaningful descriptions but, since we’ve let Twitter, Facebook etc. co-opt our control of our own presence on the net, for now, this is a more than decent workaround.

Now, as usual, the comments I get will say “But Jon, it’s not easy enough or convenient” and, for most people, yeah that’s probably true. Hell, I am expecting to bleed from the forehead trying to work out how to automate it or will just end up stupidly manually editing my .htaccess file for every link and maintaining some static structured reference file by hand or find somebody to help me set it up here because this is hardly turn-key. The point is, what should a smart company or organization do to manage how they maintain the best most direct connection to their audience rather than, usually self destructively, try to exploit Twitter, Facebook etc. to attract an audience?

Ok, so, who wants to work with me for no money to help me set all this up for my sites and publish a how-to and/or open source package that we can convince DreamHost to make a ‘One Click Install’?

Anybody feeling that charitable? 😉

– Jon