Newspapers’ User Experience Failure

Michael Fienen on January 25, 2016

For quite a while now, newspapers have been fighting upstream against other news outlets, blogs, and content sources in a battle for readership. Hell, even things like Twitter can be better and faster for getting eyeballs on an issue than mainstream sites. They’ve had many run of the mill issues, like simply lacking aesthetically pleasing designs with good information architecture that invite users in. But then there have been more specific problems like paywalls, popover ads, and interstitials which have been subject of much derision (and savvy users have been capable of working around them since nearly day one). Read More

Thoughts on Google Contributor

Michael Fienen on November 23, 2014

Google recently began testing a new platform called Contributor. The long and short of it is that as a visitor, you can “subscribe” to a site for $1 to $3, and in return they’ll take ads off the site and give a part of the money back to the site owner. It’s sort of like a blend of Patreon and Readability (back when you could donate to the site you were saving from – as it looks like maybe they don’t do that anymore now).

It’s an interesting move by Google, in my opinion, and one that speaks volumes of some of their underlying goals. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of ways this is good for them, and can generate a lot of self-serving data about valuable content on websites and the like, so I’m stopping short of calling it an altruistic system. But, that also doesn’t detract from the value that it creates if site developers can use it as a means to maintain and encourage good maintenance and content. It also has the possibility to create marginally more stable revenue streams for sites, since subscriptions are much more consistent that pay-per-clicks.

Read More

CNN Has Priorities

Michael Fienen on April 18, 2013

When breaking news happens, you can count on CNN… to not really care too damn much. I’m frankly pretty shocked that CNN doesn’t have a trigger that fires to immediately disable advertising like this on breaking news. It’s a hell of an impression to leave on a site visitor.

Thoughts on PPC Advertising Policies

Michael Fienen on March 8, 2012

So, I’ve recently gotten a couple bulk emails from HostGator regarding affiliate use of PPC ads. Here’s the latest one:

Hello Affiliates,

This is a reminder about our Pay Per Click Policy as unfortunately there are many affiliates that are still not abiding by the Terms of Service.

Please remember that it is against the affiliate TOS (Here: http://www.hostgator.com/tos/affiliate-tos.php ) to bid on trademark + keywords. Please remember to look at your keywords and match types to make sure that you don’t have the word HostGator in any of your search terms.

This includes:

HostGator
HostGator.com
Host Gator
www.hostgator.com
http://www.hostgator.com
hostgator review
hostgator reviews
hostgator coupon
hostgator coupons
hostgator discount
hostgator promo
hostgator promo code
Host Gator Review
Host Gator Coupon
Anything else with the word HostGator in it

Please discontinue bidding on these search phrases immediately. Those affiliates who continue to do so will be at risk of having their affiliate account terminated and their sales voided.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

Thank you,
HostGator.com Affiliate Team

Now, this raises two main issues for me.

1: When you see PPC ads on sites, and they mention a brand, do you just assume that ad was placed by that brand? I’m guessing you do, or at least, you don’t worry about if it’s not. But it does raise a pretty obvious question of what role the ad provider has in protecting a brand in ads placed on its service. Not that Pepsi would ever run an ad for Coke, mind you – but situations like this where an affiliate has a definite interest in getting clicks for the brand, but might be doing so in a way that the brand manager for the company doesn’t approve of. Worse yet, maybe they make false claims or such about the service to mislead people into signing up. I need to look more into the trademark issues involved on that.

2: The flipside of the coin. If I’m willing to bid more for a brand’s keyword than the brand, should I have that ability? Of course the brand can build it into their TOS like HostGator has, and stand by the “if you want to be an affiliate, you have to follow these rules” line. But is that really the right thing to do? Is it ultimately in the brand’s interests? Strictly speaking, if I’m bidding on someone else’s use of their name in a search, and maybe I don’t even use their name in the ad (for instance, Pepsi bidding on Coke keywords, but using the opportunity to show off their new drink), does the targeted brand have any recourse?

It’s an interesting marketing world we live in right now.