Things That Matter Most

Things That Matter Most

Attention Span

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I find it amazing how limited our collective attention span frequently proves to be. One day, the whole world is up in arms about a particular issue, the next they’ve all but forgotten.

In a world permeated by real-time streams of information, this is an easy trend to see. Twitter, for example, is a constant stream of content. When you’re viewing the stream, you’re engaged. When you’re not plugged in, though, you can miss a wealth of content.

Unfortunately, the rapid-fire nature of the medium doesn’t lend well to reviewing the content of previous time periods. If you take an hour off of Twitter, that hour’s content is likely lost to you forever.

The same is true for other social networks. Facebook, for example, is trying to beat the trend by hiding the “most recent” stream of content behind a few settings buttons. Instead, they attempt to curate “the top news” for your stream – successfully resurfacing “interesting” stories for you hours, days, or even weeks after they’d otherwise be buried in your feed.

None of this changes the fact that we have a limited ability to pay attention to the world around us.

Blogging

In many ways, chronological blogs – like this one – are similar to media streams like Twitter and Facebook. Thankfully, I’m not publishing content in this space every few minutes, but the site does resemble a chronological feed of information in which individual pieces can be easily lost to time.

When I look through visitor stats, it’s the most recent articles and the homepage that draw the majority of views. A handful of older posts do very well in search engine ranking, so they bring in a large number of viewers as well.

The majority of this site’s content – 470+ individual articles – goes relatively unnoticed. I personally go back and review the archives from time to time and am absolutely floored by some of the content I find.

Marketing articles on actionable ways to measure relative brand value. Essays about faith, growth, and the responsibility of members of a church. A (still remarkably accurate) list of 10 “commandments” for web design. Random poetry.

I’ve spent years building this body of content – and the format of a chronological blog serves only to surface the most recent content, even if it’s not necessarily the most valuable. I wonder if there’s a way to either challenge or work around our collective lack of attention to build a site in such a way that all content can be seen for its inherent value rather than its timeliness.

A way to make the best content always available and constantly surfaced regardless of its age.

The Death of Sponsored Content

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Just a few days ago, I read an article talking about the rise of sponsored content: when an advertiser sponsors an article on a site in exchange for the back traffic.

It’s an interesting idea, and I played with it myself a couple of years ago.  I loath advertising, but I was willing to write a review of a product or service in exchange for the free use of that product or service.

This week, though, I had one of these sponsors contact me out of the blue and request I take links on my site to theirs down:

My team and I are attempting to contact the owner and/or webmaster for eamann.com. Some time ago someone working with our company may have requested or submitted a link on your website. Recently, we were notified by Google that this link on your site did not meet Google’s guidelines and was being viewed as a Link Scheme. We recommend removing this link from your site immediately to comply with Google’s guidelines and to avoid any traffic penalties.

I took a look at the (allegedly) offending article, and don’t see anything out of the ordinary.

I was writing specifically about marketing strategy, and had the sponsor listed as a potential resource.  The only potential “out of the ordinary” element to the post is my disclosure at the bottom that it was sponsored content.

Troubling Development

I’ve never been a fan of SEO.  I think content should speak for itself and, while having proper annotations for machine indexing is important, trying to build you content to leverage specific keywords or phrases compromises the quality of the content.

Google has been quick to flag certain nefarious activities, updating their algorithms to flag blackhat SEO techniques before they take off.  Tagging otherwise legitimate links in the context of an article as suspicious, however, is troubling.

This was an actual article, written by me – not by the sponsor – with embedded resource links and a sponsorship disclosure. Having this article viewed as part of a “link scheme” makes me question just about everything else I’ve done.

Do links to other sites count as suspicious?  What about affiliate links embedded in content – like reviews of books? Where is Google drawing the line?

What Constitutes a Publisher?

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A colleague recently pointed me to an interesting article about content publishing and web intents.  The article led to some interesting discussions.

Productization

The biggest issue we discussed, which was also something with which I disagreed, was the idea that publishers’ product could be something other than content.

And let’s not forget that publishers like Medium and Circa are technology companies first, publishers second, because they approach content as a product first and foremost.

I come from a world steeped in publishing – where the focus is first and foremost on the stories you’re telling through content. The product you’re producing is the content itself, and you work with talent (writers, both copy-focused and otherwise) to produce a product worth marketing.

A technology company, on the other hand, would focus more on the platform than the stories being told upon it.  Medium is a technology company – their product is the publishing platform writers use to publish their content.  The actual publisher in this case is also the writer – Medium is not the publisher.

That Medium and similar platforms are called publishers frustrates the conversation a bit.  Take one of Medium’s competitors for example – WordPress.  If anyone were to argue that WordPress itself was a publisher, rather than a tool to empower publishers, I’d call them insane.

Publisher Identification

The second point of discussion was who exactly qualified as a publisher.  While content curation often qualifies as publishing, the idea that websites like BuzzFeed qualify as publishers when they specialize almost exclusively in curation triggered a bit of debate.

When you look at publishing, you have to consider for whom the value is being created.  In the case of sites like Medium, value is being created for writers who achieve exposure and for readers who can participate in the conversation.

What value is produced from watching two puppies meet a cat or taking a quiz to learn what childhood book you’re the most like?

When you look at the real content strategy of curation sites, you can easily see they’re aiming to create viral content that a) pulls in traffic and b) entertains those visitors enough that they in turn share the content with their own personal networks.  It’s an ad strategy, pure and simple.

If you’re in business to sell ads, your product is visitor eyeballs – not the content those eyes are consuming.  I would argue this does not make you a publishers.

Native Advertising

I loathe advertising that breaks the layout or readability of a site.  In-line block ads that force text wrapping frustrate me to no end.

A newer trend in native advertising, though, addressed ad-haters like me while still bringing in ad revenue for a site.

Many publishers have pinned their hopes on “native advertising” to be their savior to combat the decline in effectiveness of banner advertisements, by creating new ad units and flexible content that will perform better because they are more in line with a user’s experience with the site.

If you have to advertise, I’d rather you did so with sponsored content that otherwise fits within the context and flow of your existing content. 1 I don’t necessarily agree with the assertion that native ads are less effective than regular banner ads, but I do agree that content editors/curators need to recognize there’s little difference between an ad call in a banner and one in a block of prose.

Streams of Content

The final point we’ve discussed is on the evolution of web publishing from creating static pages to building dynamic streams of content.  The article quotes another fantastic piece by Anil Dash:

Users have decided they want streams, but most media companies are insisting on publishing more and more pages. And the systems which publish the web are designed to keep making pages, not to make customized streams.

I’ve seen this developing trend in web design, and I really like it.  The idea of streams is fraught with exciting new challenges – how do you embed “evergreen” content in a dynamic, temporal stream? – and wonderful new ideas in the landscape of the web.  I’ve had a content strategy around this idea for quite a while, 2 and I’m looking forward to seeing how others leverage the changing trends as well.

My prediction: this trend will drastically impact the fabric of the Internet and digital publishing within the next 5 years.  We’ll stop seeing static websites (or even quasi-dynamic blogs) and see a massive shift to much more dynamic, customizable, app-like content platforms.

How do you see publishing?  How do you qualify publishers already in the market?  What do you think the future holds for us?

Notes:

  1. I will not sell even “native” advertising on this site since I’m aiming for an ad-free revenue model. But that’s my strategy and won’t be a fit for all. ↩
  2. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink … ↩